Impertinent Daughters in Imperial Genealogies: Doris Lessing’s Autobiographical Writings

Drawing on recent debates on women’s autobiographies from gender and post-colonial perspectives, this study aims to investigate the way in which autobiographical texts of the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing are able to cast new light on motherhood. By analysing the memoir “Impertinent Daughters” (1984), the first official autobiographical volume Under My Skin: Volume One to 1949 (1994), and Alfred and Emily (2008), I aim to consider some of the implications and contradictions that mark these works: how the autobiographical metaphor of the ‘impertinent daughter’ is used by Lessing to represent herself and explore the mother-daughter relationship; how Lessing brings to the fore maternity in its complicity with colonialism, unveiling how motherhood can be implicated in power relations not only within the family, but also in wider social and political contexts; and how this metaphor unveils the more hidden, and surely more controversial, figure of the neglectful mother.