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The saga of the argumentative Briton

LONDON: It is perhaps not widely known that Doris Lessing, who has won the Nobel Prize for chronicling the female experience and the despairs of militant men-hating feminists, has often stood up for men.

At the 2001 Edinburgh Festival, Ms. Lessing questioned the culture of “unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men,” saying men had become “so cowed that they can’t fight back” — and provoked fury in feminist circles. “I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed,” she said.

And, then, turning the knife deeper she argued that it had come to a point where the “most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no-one protests.”

Feminists hit back. Helen Wilkinson, a feminist commentator, said she was “totally misguided” and accused her of jumping on the “bandwagon” of feminist-baiters. Another said she was playing to the gallery and, inadvertently, undermining the women’s movement.

Ms. Lessing returned to the theme at this year’s Haye-on-Wye literary festival saying she would not like to live in an all-female world. Speaking about her novel The Cleft, which imagines a world without men, she questioned the idea that women were necessarily more peaceful than men. In fact, some of the worst crimes had been committed by women, she claimed. “We like to think we are motherly and kind and that we are not going to go to war, but it’s not true, is it?”

Ms. Lessing is known for her outspoken views, and admitted recently “there’s something abrasive in me” which often made people cross. She attributed hostile reviews to some of her books to her own “abrasiveness” but said that as a writer it was her duty to tell the truth.

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