Autobiography as a Contested Genre. A Gender and Postcolonial Reading of Doris Lessing's Under My Skin and Alfred and Emily”

his article aims to investigate how the autobiographical writings of Doris Lessing (1919-2013) – in particular her final work Alfred and Emily (2008) and Under My Skin (1994), the first volume of Lessing’s autobiography – may be considered ‘counter discourses’ that explore, tran-sgress and subvert life writing as a literary genre. This article's central hypothesis is that Lessing tried to negotiate the public/private divide – a powerful and enduring paradigm for defining dominant gender female roles – by simultaneously unveiling and hiding certain intensely private aspects of her life as a woman that are susceptible to only partial exposure in the public realm. The autobiographical metaphor of the ‘impertinent daughter’, and the more hidden, and surely more controversial, figure of the ‘neglectful mother’, are po-werful attempts for representing her colo-nial past and her experience as a woman, who struggled with dominant rhetorical conditions and with normative categories of femininity to which she was exposed and that were (and still are) available to narrate oneself.