Doris Lessing

Novelist Doris Lessing waited a long time for her Nobel. At almost 88, there's never been an older winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, announced yesterday in Stockholm.

But Doris Lessing has always been on her own path. As a girl in colonial Rhodesia who broke out of convent school and made herself a writer. As a woman in the 1950s who smashed the mold of "little women" and insisted on full freedom, gender be damned.

Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook" made her a hero to a generation of budding feminists. And she's still writing strong.

This hour, On Point: the work of Doris Lessing.

Guests:

Judith Kegan Gardiner, English professor and director of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She's author of "Rhys, Stead, Lessing, and the politics of empathy."

Margaret Moan Rowe, professor of English at Purdue University and author of the critical study "Doris Lessing."

Harvey Blume, literary critic and author.