Second World Life Writing: Doris Lessing’s Under My Skin

The first volume of Doris Lessing’s official autobiography, Under My Skin (1994) returns her to memories of her African childhood, but also necessitates that she reassess the status of official and ‘fictionalised’ accounts of the past, especially her own story of the impact of colonisation and Empire on her family, herself and the African population in Southern Rhodesia. At the time Under My Skin appeared in the 1990s, feminist critics were working out the distinctive features of women’s autobiographical writing, and much more recently those of postcolonial life writing have been identified by critics such as Bart Moore-Gilbert (2009). This article will consider whether categories such as feminist autobiography, autobiography of empire or postcolonial autobiography are helpful in reading Under My Skin, and will investigate whether or not it is more appropriate to consider the text as an example of ‘second world’ life writing. As a second world writer, to use Stephen Slemon’s 1990 term, Lessing’s ambivalence about issues of gender, race, empire and nation, both her complicity with colonialism as the daughter of white invader settlers and her resistance to it, become easier to analyse. In order to understand how this ambivalence plays out in the text, the article will investigate whether the trope Helen Tiffin (1998) identifies as particular to second world women’s life writing – dispersive citation – is useful in reading Lessing’s autobiography and making sense of her intervention in the genre of life writing.