It’s a Nobel Prize for Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, the feisty 87-year-old British writer whose early realist novel

The Golden Notebook

(1962) virtually defined modern literary feminism in English before its author lifted off into works of science fiction that excited or stymied her fans, won the 2007 Nobel Prize for literature Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced in Stockholm.

Lessing, the oldest writer ever to win the literature prize and the 11th woman, was cited as an "epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny."

The academy declared The Golden Notebook, whose protagonist, Anna Wulf, resembles the youthful Lessing in her struggle with independence, "a pioneering work" that "informed the 20th-century view of the male-female relationship." It also praised her later five-book Martha Quest series, named after the main character, as "pioneering in its depiction of the mind and circumstances of the emancipated woman."

Lessing was visiting her son at a hospital when the prize was announced. She returned to her North London home in a cab two hours later to find reporters and photographers outside. She said she thought they might be shooting a movie. When informed of her win, the spirited octogenarian, who is famous for a flinty and sometimes imperious personality, responded in exuberant style.

"I've won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one," Lessing told the assembled press. "I'm delighted to win them all, the whole lot. It's a royal flush."

Each Nobel Prize this year is worth approximately $1.5 million. All except the Peace Prize, to be announced Friday and bestowed in Oslo in December, are formally awarded by Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustav at the annual Nobel ceremony Dec. 10.

Lessing's choice struck literary observers Thursday as either predictable or surprising, depending on whether one emphasized her earlier or later career. Early works such as The Golden Notebook and The Four-Gated City (1969), which Lessing called her "inner-space" fiction, are considered classics, and Lessing has long been on most people's Nobel short list. But American literary scholar Harold Bloom got it exactly wrong yesterday when he criticized the prize as "pure political correctness."

In fact, Lessing never tires of telling reporters and feminist academics how much she dislikes being seen as a feminist icon and how much she disagrees with any feminism that begins from a reflexive hostility to men. While still a socialist, she has long since shed much of the hard-core leftist ideology.

That later political incorrectness, in addition to her age and the more widely shared judgment Bloom offered Thursday - that much of Lessing's later "outer space" fiction is "unreadable" - were thought by many to have meant that the Swedish Academy, which usually favors literary writers on the political left, would bypass her.

Yet the academy also gave a nod to Lessing's imaginative later work, marked by the five-volume Canopus in Argos series (1979-83), citing her "vision of global catastrophe" in such recent works as The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog (2006), which takes place in a future ice age.

Doris Lessing (nee Tayler) was born in Persia (now Iran) of British parents and grew up in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her parents had moved to live on a farm. Her early writings, such as her novel The Grass Is Singing (1949), drew on her African years, during which she became a Communist. But she abandoned communism in the 1950s while remaining a harsh critic of South Africa's apartheid regime, which barred her from visiting for decades.

In a 2000 interview with this writer, Lessing, who is funny and down-to-earth but does not suffer fools - period - bristled at one of the only biographies ever written about her, Carole Klein's Doris Lessing: A Biography.

Klein, a reputable now-deceased New York-based biographer, depicted young Doris Tayler as a fiercely independent sort who dropped out of school at 14, left her parents' farm at 15, wed twice (Frank Wisdom and Gottfried Lessing), abandoned her first husband and two children, and moved to London in 1949 to begin writing.

Klein accused Lessing, this writer reported, of "coldness toward her parents, brother and others, a 'highly developed' sexuality that found its satisfaction outside of marriage, an aggressive hostility to academic feminists that's too often expressed in her 'unique unsentimental voice,' a tendency to 'share her mother's contempt for the less gifted,' and a greater kindness toward her beloved cats than toward people."

Lessing dismissed Klein's portrait, saying, "I gave up making a note of the mistakes about halfway through because I'd got about two dozen." Klein replied that Lessing, though "brilliant," was a "cult figure" whose "egoism is enormous." Lessing wrote a piece for the London Spectator calling Klein a "chipmunk."

Lessing said at the time that she had designated the distinguished biographer Michael Holroyd in her will to write an authorized biography of her, but only after her death. Asked, however, whether Klein was right in saying, "Writing is the most important thing in her life - everything else gets placed second to that," Lessing agreed: "My time is getting short. I can't waste it."

Years before, she had complained to this writer, "I've had a succession of labels." Asked whether she liked any of them - say, feminist saint or earth mother - she sighed, smiled and replied, "What a bore!"

She has always insisted that critics look too much for messages in her books, deciding that one or another dramatizes her Sufi beliefs, expresses her hatred of parenting, or mocks the human genome project.

"I'm telling a story," she said in 2000. "I'm not sending a message of any kind. But people want a nice clear message. They try to find messages in books that have no messages, as far as I'm concerned." She preferred, she said, the novelist Henry Green's idea that a novel is "a web of insinuations," a work of art to be "experienced" more than "interpreted."

"You know," she said. "I'm interested in only one thing - to get people to want to turn the pages. I'm a storyteller."

Her own story has just became much more grand.