Doris Lessing, 94, restless, rule-breaking Nobelist

LONDON - Doris Lessing, then 87, emerged from a cab outside her London home on Oct. 11, 2007, to face a horde of reporters. When told she had won the Nobel Prize, she blinked and said, "I couldn't care less."

That was typical of the independent, often irascible author who died Sunday at 94 after a career that included the 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, which made her a reluctant icon to feminists. Her books reflected her own journey across what was then the British Empire, and later her vision of a future ravaged by atomic warfare.

"Even in very old age she was always intellectually restless, reinventing herself, curious about the changing world around us, always completely inspirational," her editor at HarperCollins, Nicholas Pearson, said in one of many tributes Sunday.

Ms. Lessing explored topics ranging from colonial Africa to dystopian Britain, from the mystery of being female to the unknown worlds of science fiction. In winning the Nobel literature prize, the Swedish Academy praised her for her "skepticism, fire and visionary power."

Often polarizing, she didn't save her fire for the page. Recent targets of her ire included George W. Bush ("a world calamity") and modern women ("smug, self-righteous"). She raised hackles by deeming the 9/11 attacks "not that terrible."

She remains best known for The Golden Notebook, whose heroine uses four notebooks to bring together the separate parts of her disintegrating life in a fifth. The novel made her an icon for women's liberation but was so widely discussed and dissected that she later called it a "failure" and "an albatross."

"It took realism apart from the inside," said Lorna Sage, an academic who knew Ms. Lessing since the 1970s. "Lessing threw over the conventions she grew up in to stage a kind of breakdown - to celebrate disintegration as the representative experience of a generation."

Although she continued to publish at least one book every two years, her later works were criticized as didactic and impenetrable.

Born Doris May Tayler on Oct. 22, 1919, in Persia (now Iran), where her father was a bank manager, she moved to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) at 5. She was reading Dickens and Kipling at 10 and lived by the motto, "I will not." Her formal education at a Roman Catholic girls school ended at 13; in constant conflict with her mother, who loathed her own restricted life, she soon left home for Salisbury (now Harare).

At 19, she married her first husband, Frank Wisdom, with whom she had a son and a daughter. She abandoned them all to pursue her own interests, having been drawn into the Left Book Club, a group of literary communists and socialists headed by Gottfried Lessing, who became her second husband and fathered her third child.

Neither regarded the marriage as permanent, and when Ms. Lessing, now 30, became disillusioned with communism in 1949, she left Gottfried and moved to Britain. Along with her young son, Peter, she packed the manuscript of her first novel. The Grass is Singing, which used the story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage to portray poverty and racism in Southern Rhodesia. It was published in 1950 to great success in Europe and the United States.

She then embarked on five deeply autobiographical novels - from Martha Quest to The Four-Gated City - that became her "Children of Violence" series. Her nonfiction ranged from Going Home in 1957, about returning to Southern Rhodesia, to Particularly Cats, about her pets, published in 1967.

In the 1950s, she became an honorary member of a writers' group known as the Angry Young Men, who were seen as injecting radical new energy into British culture. Her London home became a center not only for writers and critics but also for drifters and loners.

Ms. Lessing's early novels decried the dispossession of black Africans and criticized South Africa's apartheid system, prompting Southern Rhodesia and South Africa to bar her in 1956. Later governments overturned the orders, and in June 1995, she returned to South Africa to see her daughter, Jean, and grandchildren, who survive her.

In Britain, Ms. Lessing won the Somerset Maugham Award in 1954, and was made a Companion of Honor in 1999, after turning down the chance to become a Dame of the British Empire, on the ground that there was no British Empire anymore.

She often presented women, herself included, as vain and territorial, and insisted in a 1993 Golden Notebook edition that the book was not a "trumpet for women's liberation."

In a 1996 interview she said, "Whatever type of behavior women are coming up with, it's claimed as a victory for feminism - doesn't matter how bad it is. We don't seem to go in very much for self-criticism."

And was she really dismissive of the Nobel? Her editor, Pearson, said, "That was typical Doris. She took things in their stride," he said. "I think she was delighted."