Bids for popularity were not Doris Lessing's thing.
Already in the hours since the death of Doris Lessing was announced, many people will have watched a widely circulated video, filmed on her doorstep in 2007.
In it, she has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, the news of which is relayed to her by reporters as
she alights from a London taxi.
"Oh Christ," she says in apparent irritation, and puts down her shopping bags. Watching, you think she must have heard it wrong. But no. Pausing to check whether she has left anything in the cab, she turns to the camera crews and sighs. "I'm sure you'd like some uplifting remarks of some kind," she says.
Bids for popularity were not Doris Lessing's thing. Of course, that made her more appealing.
She was popular in ways she never meant to be. Take her best-known work, The Golden Notebook, which Margaret Drabble called "a novel of shocking power and blistering honesty". Its most striking formal aspect - that writers are divided selves - was largely ignored in favour of its much more controversially intimate aspect. In a later preface to the book, Lessing wrote that it had been "instantly belittled as being about the sex war".
