Doris Lessing

Doris Lessing, who has died 94, was an inspirational novelist, playwright, memoirist and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her writing was always hard to label and was influenced by, among other things, mysticism, science-fiction, the First World War, Communism, colonialism and anti-racism. She was also often described as a pioneer and icon of feminism but it was a description with which she was uncomfortable. She wrote about the experience of women, often by breaking the literary rules, but that did not necessarily make her a feminist. "I have nothing in common with feminists," she once said, "because of their inflexibility."

This antipathy to being straightjacketed did not prevent Lessing's most famous novel The Golden Notebook being claimed as one of the seminal texts of the women's liberation movement, although it was as much about Stalinism and war as it was about feminism. Published in 1962, it tells the story of writer Anna Wulf and it is the book's narrative experimentation exploring Anna's multiple selves that makes it so memorable. Many women of the post-war generation saw it as a touchstone book but Lessing herself did not like to see it in narrow terms. For her, it was a way of looking at the self and the world from multiple angles and like much of her other work, it was deeply autobiographical: Lessing's fiction frequently came from the complex, troubled facts of her own life.

She was born in Persia, now Iran, and had an unhappy childhood. Both her parents were British: her father Alfred Taylor was a bank clerk who had been crippled in the First World War, her mother Emily was a nurse of Scottish and Irish descent. In the early 1920s, the family moved to Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in pursuit of a better life but the promise of great wealth through maize farming never came to pass.

They lived in a mud hut and although Lessing could roam in the countryside, it was a rigid life for her. She was sent to a convent school and then an all-girls' school and whenever she looked back, Lessing saw her childhood as damaged - partly because her father was obsessed with the First World War, but also because she believed her mother loved her brother more than her.

"I was a terribly damaged child," she said. "terribly neurotic, over-sensitive, over-suffering, I could say that my mother loved my brother and didn't love me but that's terribly common isn't it?" She also said: "I was thinking about how to escape all the time."

Before long, she did. Her contrariness and rebellion led to her dropping out of school and she left home when she was 15. She took jobs as a nursemaid and a telephone operator, but also began a process of self-education in literature and politics that would lead to her becoming a writer. She sold some stories to magazines in South Africa and became increasingly interested in Communism, joining the Left Book Club in Salisbury.

It was at the club that she met Gottfried Lessing, a German communist whom she married to prevent him being interned as an enemy alien during the Second World War. However, they did have a child together before divorcing in 1949. It was, in fact, Lessing's second marriage - she had married a civil servant Frank Wisdom in 1939 and had two children but, as she often did, she felt trapped by convention and left him and her two children behind. She said she never regretted the decision. "On the contrary," she said, "I'm very proud of myself that I had the guts to do it. I've always said that if I hadn't left that life, if I hadn't escaped from the intolerable boredom of colonial circles, I'd have cracked up, become an alcoholic."

Her escape was writing and a new life in London. It was there in 1949 that she published her first novel The Grass is Singing, which was inspired by her experiences in Africa and relates the story of the death of a white woman, a farmer's wife, at the hands of an African servant. It was the first of a series of novels in the 1950s and 60s that criticised the dispossession of black Africans by white colonials. They led to her being declared a prohibited alien in Rhodesia and South Africa.

The Golden Notebook, her masterpiece, was published in 1962 and it was the beginning of the literary experimentation for which she would become famous. By the end of the 1970s her fiction was heading in new directions with a sequence of five novels under the overall title Canopus in Argos: Archives. The novels reflected her growing interest in Sufi mysticism and the most extreme of them, The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982), foreshadowed fear of climate change.

She continued to experiment throughout her career. In the 1990s, she collaborated with Philip Glass and provided the libretto for the opera The Marriage Between Zones Three, Four and Five. Glass had also been inspired to turn The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 into an opera in 1988.

In the 1990s, Lessing produced two volumes of autobiography: the first is set mainly in Rhodesia and is an account of her childhood and youthful marriages; the second is a biting and hilarious account of London literary and political life in the 1950s and 60s.

She wrote about her great love for cats. On Cats was published in 2002 and speculated on whether, in fact, it is cats who play with us rather than us with them. There were also volumes of short stories, a rich collection of essays and reviews, discussing writers as varied as Jane Austen, Christina Stead and Muriel Spark, all examined with great warmth and generosity.

In place of a third volume of autobiography, there was a saga of contemporary life, The Sweetest Dream (2001). There was also a graphic novel. And more fable: Mara and Dann (1999) is set on planet Earth, in a time when ecological shift has frozen the Mediterranean; it follows nomadic refugees on the road to rebuild their lives.

Her other novels include The Good Terrorist in 1985 and The Fifth Child in 1988. She also published two novels under the pen name Jane Somers: The Diary of a Good Neighbour in 1983 and If The Old Could a year later. Her final book, Alfred and Emily, was published in 2008 and recounted her childhood in Rhodesia.

Looking back on her career, as well as her discomfort with the label 'feminism', Lessing also spoke about how she fell out of love with Communism, which had driven much of her early work. She once said that she was inspired by the men and women of the Left she met in Rhodesia because they were people who, in her words, read everything, and who did not think it remarkable to read. However, later she saw them differently.

"Some of them were marvellous people and they tended to be very good at analysing the problems of their own society," she said. "But they talked absolute rubbish about international affairs and the Soviet Union. I left the party (in the 1950s) when everybody else did, as it became evident that the Soviet Union was a very bad place."

Lessing was also uncertain about the effect her group of writers and revolutionaries had on the fight for civil rights. Speaking to The Herald in 2007, she said: "Like so many revolutionaries', we were very good at talking. I don't think we had any effect whatsoever on the blacks. We never met any. It was only when I came here that I met blacks on a decent kind of level. The people in our debating societies, we discovered afterwards were stooges, sent by the government. We were very raw."

In 1995, she received an honorary degree from Harvard University and in 1999 was appointed a companion of honour (having turned down a damehood which she described as a pantomimey). In 2005, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature

She is survived by two of her children and pre-deceased by her son John.