good bye Doris Lessing

picture by Jane Bown

She may not have changed the world in quite the way she had imagined when she set sail for Britain all those years ago, and it may be far from the beautiful place she envisaged, but she has changed the lives of countless readers and, whether she liked it or not (and it's a fair bet that secretly she did), she helped change the way women are perceived, and perceive themselves.

The Golden Notebook was the second English language novel I read in my life, hunched over at the university library in Heidelberg, pretending to study for my exams, while at the back of my mind I had already started to change my life. Thank you.