Doris Lessing’s literary executors are on the hunt for new biographer

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/04/doris-lessing-literary-estate-to-appoint-biographer

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The literary executors of Doris Lessing’s will are looking to appoint a new biographer of the Nobel laureate, who will have access to the diaries Lessing had stipulated would remain closed to her family.

The acclaimed author, who died in 2013 aged 94, left behind her more than 50 books, including the feminist classic The Golden Notebook. Lessing wrote in her will, dated to 2009, that she wished Michael Holroyd, the award-winning biographer of George Bernard Shaw, to undertake the task of writing her own life. But Lessing added that if Holroyd was unable or unwilling to do so, then her literary executors should appoint another authorised biographer who should, she stated, “be given full access to all my literary estate (including my diaries) for the purpose only of writing my biography”.

Lessing also directed in her will that the diaries be sealed throughout the lives of her children and of writer Jenny Diski, who was taken in by the author as a teenager. “None of my family or of Jenny Diski’s are to have access to the diaries,” she wrote.

“They are not to be seen by her family,” said Holroyd, one of the will’s literary executors, “just the biographer.” And that person will not, he added, be him.

“I was put down as the biographer in about 1993. Doris wrote to me that year to confirm, and I said yes, but I was younger then,” he told the Guardian. “I am now in my 80th year, and her archive is absolutely enormous – pretty well as large as Bernard Shaw’s and scattered as widely as his. It would take me the best part of 10 years to research and write her life, and that means I am too old. But I am also a literary executor in her will, and in that role I gave myself the sack as her biographer.”

Now he and his fellow executors are considering who will take on the mantle. “We’ve got propositions from a number of people, academics and non-academics, women and men. It’s taking a little bit of time, but we would like to make a decision this spring,” said Holroyd. “This doesn’t mean no one else can write a book in which Doris exists, but no one except the biographer will be able to see the journals … What we’ll suggest when we approach a biographer is that they make contact fairly soon with the family, so that as things arise, they can discuss them.”

The diaries are kept from Lessing’s family, he believes, for reasons of “sensitivity”. “Sometimes one can write something in anger. They will show what she feels at certain periods of time, and in order to interpret that, I think the biographer will need to read everything, and then to interpret it with the assistance of friends and family.”

Lessing was born in Iran but brought up in Zimbabwe, the setting for her first novel, The Grass Is Singing. In 1949 she divorced her second husband, and left for London with her young son, Peter. Her two older children, John and Jean, stayed with their father, her first husband. Her two sons died before her, and Peter died just three weeks before Lessing.

Lessing donated the “physical material” of her literary estate, excluding manuscripts but including her diaries and correspondence, to the University of East Anglia, to which she had previously given a collection of more than 100 personal letters. “We are currently sitting on some 45 unopened archive boxes [and are] awaiting the arrival in four weeks time of the archivist for whom this will be an immediate task,” said Christopher Bigsby, a friend of the author’s and a professor of American studies at UEA.

Last year, a huge collection of her personal library – more than 3,000 volumes – went to a lending library in Harare, Zimbabwe.

Holroyd admitted that the task before any biographer of the author, who was cited by the Nobel committee as an “epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”, would be huge. “It will take an enormous amount of research work, and of time, to go to America, to UEA, to South Africa. It’s an enormous undertaking,” he said.