Exploring Doris Lessing’s library – I wanted to say: ‘Here is a book she loved’

From Sophocles to pseudoscience, each of Doris Lessing’s 4,000 books played a role in shaping her mind and her work. In the wake of her death in 2013, Nick Holdstock was invited to catalogue the overflowing accumulation of a 60-year career

When Doris Lessing was eight she was sent to a convent school where the nuns stopped her reading the classics. They thought Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling unsuitable for a girl her age. Though many children would have been cowed by this stipulation, Lessing was undeterred. She wrote to her parents, asking them to tell the nuns she had their permission. As she later explained in her autobiography, “What was my own, where I belonged, was the world of books, but I had to fight for it.”

Four months after Lessing’s death, in November 2013, I was asked to come to her house in West Hampstead, London, because the executors of her estate had a problem. Her house contained more than 4,000 books that had to be inventoried in order for the estate to be settled. I agreed to help – I wanted to know what sort of reader Lessing had been, whether she folded page corners, highlighted passages, wrote in the margins or on blank pages. I thought that learning what she read, and how, would shed light on her work.

I wanted to know what sort of reader she had been, if she folded page corners, highlighted passages, wrote in margins

I found 19 copies of Lessing’s Nobel prize acceptance speech in a box under the bath

Part of the attraction of ideas like ESP and cosmic waves is that they expand our notion of what’s possible

Each book had played a role in shaping the mind and work of Lessing, but they weren’t a record of her thoughts

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via Science fiction | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2khm9cg