Reading List

Authors Like Doris Lessing

Q: What should I read after The Golden Notebook?

Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), which appeared a year after it. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) is the argument behind all of them.

Q: Which Doris Lessing book should I read first?

The Grass Is Singing (1950) is short and the easiest way in. The Golden Notebook (1962) is her best-known novel but long and experimental; The Fifth Child (1988) is short and dark.

In 1949 Doris Lessing arrived in London from Southern Rhodesia with her youngest son, Peter, having left her two older children with their father. She had grown up on a farm of about a thousand acres of bush, where her father, who had lost a leg in the First World War, never made the money her mother hoped for. Her first novel, The Grass Is Singing, came out in 1950. In The Golden Notebook (1962) the writer Anna Wulf splits her life into four notebooks, black, red, yellow and blue, before trying to bring it together in a golden one. When a reporter told her in 2007 that she had won the Nobel Prize, she was coming home from the shops; she was 87. The ten writers below share her ground: women who refuse the life laid out for them, politics felt in private life, and fiction that breaks its own form when it has to.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Women’s lives · Southern Africa · Politics · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you love Doris Lessing, start with Nadine Gordimer, another Nobel laureate who wrote white southern Africa from inside and against it, and Tsitsi Dangarembga, whose Nervous Conditions (1988) tells colonial Rhodesia from a Shona family’s side. Rachel Cusk takes up The Golden Notebook’s questions about women, freedom and form. Further down are the South African novelist who came before them all, and two writers who, like Lessing, used invented worlds to think about this one.

10 authors like Doris Lessing

The African farm novel before hers

Olive Schreiner

South African · The Story of an African Farm (1883), Woman and Labour (1911)

Schreiner was born in 1855 on a mission station in the Cape Colony and died in 1920. The Story of an African Farm, published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, follows children growing up on an isolated Karoo farm, among them Lyndall, who refuses to marry. Woman and Labour argued for women’s right to work. She left the Cape branch of the Women’s Enfranchisement League when other branches sought to exclude Black women from the vote.

The first major novel of a girl’s mind on a southern African farm, written nearly seventy years before The Grass Is Singing. Both writers use the isolated farm as a pressure chamber for questions about race, marriage and what a woman is allowed to want.

— Lisanne

A room and money of her own

Virginia Woolf

British · Mrs Dalloway (1925), A Room of One’s Own (1929)

Woolf was born in London in 1882 and ran the Hogarth Press with her husband, Leonard. A Room of One’s Own, based on lectures she gave at Cambridge in 1928, argues that a woman needs money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction. She died in 1941.

The Golden Notebook is in many ways the novel Woolf asked for: a woman writer examining her own mind, work and money without apology. Woolf breaks the novel’s form through consciousness, Lessing through notebooks and documents.

— Lisanne

Every book by Virginia Woolf →

White South Africa, from inside

Nadine Gordimer

South African · The Conservationist (1974), Burger’s Daughter (1979)

Gordimer was born in Springs, near Johannesburg, in 1923 and lived in South Africa all her life. The Conservationist shared the Booker Prize in 1974; Burger’s Daughter, about the daughter of a white communist activist, was banned in South Africa soon after publication. She won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991 and died in 2014.

Gordimer and Lessing share a subject, white people in a racist settler society, and a political education on the left. Gordimer stayed and wrote from inside apartheid for decades; Lessing left in 1949 and was later banned from returning.

— Lisanne

Rhodesia from the other side

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Zimbabwean · Nervous Conditions (1988), This Mournable Body (2018)

Dangarembga was born in Mutoko, Southern Rhodesia, in 1959. Nervous Conditions follows Tambu, a girl from a poor rural family who gets the chance of a mission education; This Mournable Body, the third novel about her, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020. She was arrested in Harare in 2020 over an anti-corruption protest, and her conviction was overturned on appeal in 2023.

The writer here who most complicates Lessing. Lessing wrote Rhodesia’s racism as a white girl on a farm; Dangarembga writes the same country from a Shona family, where colonial education is both escape and wound. Read Nervous Conditions after The Grass Is Singing.

— Lisanne

Invented worlds, real politics

Ursula K. Le Guin

American · The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), The Dispossessed (1974)

Le Guin was born in Berkeley, California, in 1929 and died in 2018. The Left Hand of Darkness imagines a planet whose people have no fixed sex; The Dispossessed follows a physicist from an anarchist moon who visits the capitalist planet it orbits. Both novels won the Hugo and Nebula awards.

The best companion to Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels, which she called “space fiction”. Both use other worlds to examine the politics of this one, and both are more interested in societies than in gadgets.

— Lisanne

Every book by Ursula K. Le Guin →

Women, power and the future

Margaret Atwood

Canadian · Surfacing (1972), The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)

Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. The Handmaid’s Tale imagines a theocratic American state that forces fertile women to bear children for its ruling class; its sequel, The Testaments, shared the Booker Prize in 2019.

Atwood, like Lessing, moves freely between realism and speculative fiction and keeps returning to what societies do to women’s bodies and choices. Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Atwood’s dystopias both imagine life after a collapse.

— Lisanne

Every book by Margaret Atwood →

A breakdown, written down

Sylvia Plath

American · The Bell Jar (1963), Ariel (1965)

Plath was born in Boston in 1932 and lived in England from 1955. The Bell Jar, published in London under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas weeks before her death in February 1963, follows Esther Greenwood, a gifted student whose breakdown after a summer in New York leads to hospital and electroconvulsive treatment.

The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Bell Jar (1963) appeared within a year of each other, and both put a clever woman’s breakdown at the centre of the novel. Plath writes it as one young woman’s experience; Lessing connects Anna Wulf’s crack-up to politics, sex and the limits of the novel itself.

— Lisanne

Every book by Sylvia Plath →

The Golden Notebook’s heir

Rachel Cusk

British, born in Canada · Aftermath (2012), Outline (2014)

Cusk was born in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1967 and spent part of her childhood in Los Angeles before her family moved to England. Her memoirs of motherhood, A Life’s Work (2001), and of divorce, Aftermath, drew fierce criticism for their frankness. Outline began a trilogy in which a writer, Faye, is known mostly through what other people tell her.

Cusk takes up Lessing’s central question, what a free woman’s life looks like after marriage and motherhood, and like Lessing she breaks the conventional novel to answer it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rachel Cusk →

A woman’s mind in fragments

Jenny Offill

American · Dept. of Speculation (2014), Weather (2020)

Offill was born in 1968. Dept. of Speculation tells the story of a marriage in short fragments from the wife’s point of view, through motherhood, writing and an affair. Weather follows a university librarian absorbing other people’s fears about the climate and the news.

Offill does in a few pages what Lessing does across notebooks: she shows a woman’s mind divided between work, love, a child and the state of the world. Her books are short and bright where Lessing’s are vast.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jenny Offill →

From southern Africa to London

Deborah Levy

British, born in South Africa · Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), Hot Milk (2016)

Levy was born in Johannesburg in 1959. The apartheid government placed her father, Norman Levy, under a banning order, and the family moved to London in 1968. Swimming Home (2011) and Hot Milk were both shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her “living autobiography”, three short books from Things I Don’t Want to Know to Real Estate (2021), is about writing, motherhood and making a life after marriage.

Levy shares Lessing’s biography in miniature, a childhood in white southern Africa and a move to London, and her living autobiography takes up the question of The Golden Notebook: how a woman makes room for her own work.

— Lisanne

Every book by Deborah Levy →

Where to start if you loved Doris Lessing

If you loved The Grass Is Singing, read Tsitsi Dangarembga.

Nervous Conditions: colonial Rhodesia from a Shona girl’s side.

If you loved The Golden Notebook, read Rachel Cusk.

Outline: a woman writer after marriage, known through what others tell her.

If you want the ambition of the Canopus novels, read Ursula K. Le Guin.

The Dispossessed: two worlds, two political systems, one physicist.

If you want white South Africa from inside, read Nadine Gordimer.

Burger’s Daughter: the daughter of a communist activist, banned soon after publication.

If you want more Doris Lessing, read her in order.

Start with The Grass Is Singing (1950), then The Golden Notebook (1962), The Fifth Child (1988) and the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin (1994).

Frequently asked questions about authors like Doris Lessing

Who writes like Doris Lessing?

Nadine Gordimer, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Rachel Cusk are the closest matches. Gordimer also wrote white southern Africa from inside, Dangarembga writes colonial Rhodesia from a Shona family’s side, and Cusk takes up The Golden Notebook’s questions about women, freedom and form.

What should I read after The Golden Notebook?

Rachel Cusk’s Outline (2014), Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation (2014) and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), which appeared a year after it. Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929) is the argument behind all of them.

Does Doris Lessing have a new book?

No. Lessing died in London on 17 November 2013, aged 94. Her last book, Alfred and Emily (2008), pairs a novella imagining her parents’ lives without the First World War with a memoir of the lives they actually had.

Which Doris Lessing book should I read first?

The Grass Is Singing (1950) is short and the easiest way in. The Golden Notebook (1962) is her best-known novel but long and experimental; The Fifth Child (1988) is short and dark.

Did Doris Lessing write under a pseudonym?

Yes. In the early 1980s she wrote two novels as Jane Somers, The Diary of a Good Neighbour (1983) and If the Old Could (1984), to show how hard it was for unknown writers to get published. Both were later reissued under her own name.

Is Doris Lessing like Margaret Atwood?

In part. Both moved between realist and speculative fiction and wrote about women and power; Lessing’s Canopus in Argos novels and The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) sit close to Atwood’s dystopias such as The Handmaid’s Tale (1985).

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

Authors Like Doris Lessing

10 authors like Doris Lessing

Olive Schreiner

Virginia Woolf

Nadine Gordimer

Tsitsi Dangarembga

Ursula K. Le Guin

Margaret Atwood

Sylvia Plath

Rachel Cusk

Jenny Offill

Deborah Levy

Where to start if you loved Doris Lessing

Frequently asked questions about authors like Doris Lessing

Who writes like Doris Lessing?

What should I read after The Golden Notebook?

Does Doris Lessing have a new book?

Which Doris Lessing book should I read first?

Did Doris Lessing write under a pseudonym?

Is Doris Lessing like Margaret Atwood?

Lisanne Swart

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