Doris Lessing is widely regarded as one of the most vital post-war writers in English. Most of Doris Lessing novels, short stories and essays are focused on twentieth-century issues and concerns. In her early novels set in Africa she focused on the politics of race and some other works depicted the politics of gender which made her adopt the feminist movement. In her space fiction of the late 1970s and early 1980s the role of the family and the individual in society had been explored.

At the age of nineteen she married Frank Wisdom, a civil servant; they had two children. The marriage ended in 1943. In the same year Lessing married the German political activist Gottfried Lessing. Doris Lessing's second marriage was also unsuccessful. Later in 1949 she shifted to England with her youngest child.

The Grass is Singing, which appeared in 1950 was Lessing’s first novel and from then Lessing supported herself and her son by writing poems, plays, and several science fiction novels. In the year 2007 she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.