The British government’s MI5 agency spied on author Doris Lessing for 20 years, newly unclassified documents have revealed.
The Guardian has the scoop:
Lessing first came to MI5’s notice in the early 1940s in Southern Rhodesia when, as Doris Tayler, she married Gottfried Lessing, a communist activist and leading figure in the Left Book Club.
She once described marrying Lessing as her “revolutionary duty”. She kept his surname when the marriage ended and she left Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where she was brought up, and moved to Britain in 1949.
The author died in 2013 at the age of 94 in London. The Nobel Prize-winning novelist helped start libraries in Zimbabwe after the country became independent in 1980 and left her book collection to the country after she died.