Epigraph:

By now, it hardly needs saying that, in life as in her writing, Doris Lessing resists labelling. Her parents were British, both born in England, but Doris was born in Persia in 1919, and from 1925 grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), then under British rule. In 1949 she left Africa for Britain, and has lived in London ever since. Her early years on a remote African farm are remembered in her writing as both a time of wandering freely, alone or with her brother, through the surrounding veld, and a time of outrage and rebellion against her mother's rule, underpinned by standards more appropriate to Edwardian England than to a poor farm in Africa. Indeed, apart from the freedom to roam the bush, it was not an easy childhood: the First World War, Lessing would come to see, had damaged both her parents, permanently. Her father, who had lost a leg to shrapnel, was haunted by memories of the trenches; her mother nursed the wounded of that war and lost the love of her life – a doctor – as so many did. Decades later, Lessing would admit, in Alfred and Emily,