IN common with all great artists, Doris Lessing realised that to exploit fully her talent she had to feel free to pursue her own destiny.

As a child growing up in Africa she was so neglected she could roam wherever she pleased. But that was not her definition of freedom. In fact, she was trapped in a poverty-stricken family in which her mother made it obvious she preferred her brother while her father harped on constantly about the First World War, in which he'd lost a leg. "The trenches," Lessing once wrote, "were as present to me as anything I actually saw around me."

She gave up on school when she was 14, after which she read and read, acquiring a hinterland of which many of today's writers aspiring can only dream. Back then, in the 1930s, it was not unusual for those who loved books to read the entire contents of a public library, going from A to Z through the fiction section.

Lessing knew she wanted to be a writer but she must also have known at a subliminal level she had first to lay down foundations.

Unrestricted access through a book club to the likes of Dostoevsky and Proust, Thomas Mann and DH Lawrence was her equivalent of a creative writing course: I know which I'd rather have had.

She came to fame in the 1950s, a decade invariably associated with not-so-angry young men, such as John Braine, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne who, Lessing once said, reminded her of "a young dog who had been badly treated".

In hindsight, however, it was not men who produced the best work in that decade but women, including Lessing. Her debut novel The Grass Is Singing appeared in 1950, after which there was no stopping her.

Hers was the generation of Penelope Fitzgerald, Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark, all of whom were born between 1916 and 1919. Of them, it was Spark with whom Lessing felt she had the strongest bond.

To the dismay of both, they discovered later in life that while in Rhodesia they had lived relatively close to one another. "How I would have loved to have someone like Doris to talk to," wrote Spark in her autobiography.

The feeling was reciprocal, for Lessing realised how difficult it must have been for Spark to come from buttoned-up Edinburgh to such a bigoted, philistine society. Five or so years ago, Lessing told me she still felt a "retrospective protectiveness" towards her slightly older sister writer.

Both Spark and Lessing were criticised for what was seen as "abandoning" their children when their first marriages broke down. It is not a dagger that was ever pointed at the heart of the Angry Young Men who took it for granted that when they left the marital home their wives would see to the needs of their offspring.

Of course, Spark and Lessing did not abandon their children; rather they placed them in the care of others while they, as single women in an era when state support was pitiful, went about earning a living, and not only for themselves.

Until now I have used their surnames. It was my privilege, however, to know them as friends. I first met Doris 24 years ago in Toronto when we were both attending a literary festival, during which we were required to stay for 10 days and not do very much.

One evening Doris asked a few of us to accompany her to the BamBoo Club, now sadly no longer extant. It transpired it was her 70th birthday and, in celebration, she and I danced to the infectious beat of the Bhundu Boys.

Here was a very different Doris from the one who was often described as "difficult" by those couldn't keep pace with her intellect. Few could. She was formidably clever and impatient of those who'd forgotten to reboot their brains.

I used often to think she would have made a fine advocate for there was no hiding the truth from her. Once she asked if I would chair her session at the Edinburgh Book Festival but I regretfully declined, saying I had an unbreakable previous engagement.

She was not best pleased when, after a remorseless interrogation, I revealed she had been stood up for a game of five-a-side football.