Doris Lessing's Experiments in African Theatre
A blog for my favourite Texas institution
In January I arrived at the Ransom Center with the prospect of spending four months in glorious Austin to immerse myself in the archive of Nobel Prize–winning author Doris Lessing (1919–2013). The focus of my research is to understand how Lessing conceives of the individual and the collective—from family to communist cell to cosmos—across her published and personal writing. With so much time ahead of me and the knowledge that I am one of the few scholars to gain such an expansive view of Lessing’s vast collection of papers, manuscripts, and correspondence, I happily indulged my interest in the author outside of my primary research focus. Although she was a prolific writer in so many genres and forms, her playwriting is lesser known, and I found myself drawn to Lessing’s early experiments with theatre, particularly because of what they can tell us about her political awakening in colonial Africa.
… And you can read the rest of this article on the Harry Ransom Center website!
