In The Guardian, the great Margaret Atwood considers the equally-great Doris Lessing, on the occasion of her death. Atwood discovered Lessing and read her feminist masterpiece The Golden Notebook in the early 60s. Atwood notes about this time:

[T]his was before second-wave feminism. It was before widespread birth control. It was before mini-skirts. So Anna Wulf was a considerable eye-opener: she was doing things and thinking things that had not been much discussed at the Toronto dinner tables of our adolescence, and therefore seemed pretty daring.

This statement itself is a considerable eye-opener, and reveals just how much of a radical figure Lessing really was. The Golden Notebook hasn’t, even today, lost its power to provoke—at the time that a young Margaret Atwood read the novel on a Paris park bench (before she was asked, by a policeman, to leave), it must have been positively revolutionary.

Lessing was a fearless writer, and she’ll be missed.