Doris Lessing was born in 1919 to British parents in Kermanshah, Persia (modern-day Iran), where her father worked as a clerk for the Imperial Bank of Persia. The family relocated in 1925 to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which was a British Colony at the time. Lessing remained in Rhodesia until 1949, marrying twice in that time. She had two children with her first husband, Frank Wisdom, and a third with her second husband, Gottfried Lessing. When her second marriage ended in 1949, she moved to London, taking her younger son with her and leaving her two older children with their father, Wisdom. This move led some critics to describe her as having abandoned her children. In the patriarchal environment of the British Empire at mid-century, Lessing was not the only woman who found it difficult or impossible to balance serious ambition with the demands of motherhood. “I haven’t yet met a woman who isn’t bitterly rebellious,” she wrote in a letter to her friend John Whitehorn, “wanting children, but resenting them because of the way we are cribbed cabined and confined.”

Lessing was an activist as well as a writer. Her early experiences in Rhodesia made her an ardent opponent of British colonialism, and while still living there, she joined a local Communist Party comprised of young, predominantly white Rhodesians who hoped to bring about an end to the racist regime.