The Far Counties: Lessing’s Early Years

Abstract

Doris Lessing was born in Kermanshah, Persia, on 22 October 1919. She began life as Doris May Taylor, the first child of Emily Maude McVeagh and Alfred Cook Taylor who had left (escaped) England after the Great War to pursue a freer, less constrained life in the East. By the time Doris Taylor was 5, Alfred Taylor, once again, felt too constricted by protocols — this time associated with the life of a British banker in Persia — and decided ‘to light out for the territory’, the Southern Rhodesia that would later become Zimbabwe.

the BBC, the Observer and Stephen King-Hall’s newsletters about British politics were more real to her parents than anything which happened in, or came out of, Rhodesia.

C. J. Driver¹