Lessing loathed that white settler culture and exposed its amorality in her first novel, The Grass is Singing (1950), which entered forbidden territory by dealing with the relationship between a white farmer's wife and her black servant. But Lessing's escape from her family led her into another trap, marriage to a civil servant at the age of 19. She said to me of that marriage: "I don't think marriages are like that now It's when you walk into a role. The life was all laid down, what you ate, everything you did, and I went through it all as if it were a role in a play, really, and I hated it bitterly I can't tell you.

I hated it." When her marriage to Frank Wisdom broke up, she left not just her husband but also her first two children, John and Jean But her second escape turned out to be a false freedom, too. This time, she ended up married both to Gottfried Lessing, a German refugee, and to Communism It's easy to see why Lessing became involved with Communism. In Southern Rhodesia, it was the first time that she had met a group of people "who read everything, and did not think it remarkable to read, and among whom thoughts about the 'Native Problem' I had scarcely dared to say aloud turned out to be mere commonplaces." But in Under My Skin, the first volume of her autobiography, she is characteristically honest about the moral failure Communism represented. In considering the horrors of Stalinism, she says: "I have to face the fact that I and my high-minded comrades, both those in that chimerical Communist Party in Southern Rhodesia, and many I have met since ... were of the stuff of those murderers with a clear conscience. We were lucky, that's all." Lessing's involvement with Communism lasted until 1956, seven years after she arrived in London, and she struggles to explain why she didn't get out earlier. "It was a sort of mass psychosis that took hold of us," she told me.

"Partly it was a feeling that it was our job to put things right, that we couldn't just desert the movement, we were responsible for the future It was an extraordinary hubris. Very extraordinary it all was, looking back." After the Second World War was over, Lessing knew that she couldn't continue with her life in the provincial, racist society that she loathed She decided to return to the country of her parents. But when she got off the boat in London in 1949, at the age of 30, she had almost nothing with her but her young son and the manuscript of her first novel. She arrived in a city that was still struggling to emerge from the exigencies of the war, and during the Fifties, despite the immediate success of The Grass is Singing, she struggled to keep afloat. She rented cheap flats, sold her mother's jewellery and lived hand-to-mouth She was poor, she was an immigrant, she was a single mother. In the second volume of her autobiography, Walking in the Shade, she gives you a real sense of what it meant to live without any security.

Take just one sentence from the book, "I was walking down Church Street, having dropped the child at school, and I was crying because I couldn't buy food." But it was then that Lessing became a real writer. She brought up her son, but she also wrote the stories, plays, poetry and novels that make up one of the most prodigious and impressive oeuvres of our time. She now says that she thinks it was being a single mother that made her a writer at that point. "It did help me ­ I didn't realise just how much at the time," she said. "But I now see what would have happened if I hadn't had Peter. Soho then was full of the most glamorous clubs and glamorous people, poets and painter.

I would have drifted off to Soho and been lost." That's not to say that Lessing began to live a nun-like existence. Once she got to London she immediately became extremely sociable, part of a relaxed, bohemian crowd, and lived a rollercoaster romantic life. She candidly describes the two great affairs or her life in Walking in the Shade and although they both ended miserably, she looks back without bitterness. "I had a deep fear of being trapped in a relationship," she said Love, not security, was what she was after. Perhaps one reason why some women find her an unlikely feminist is the great relish with which Lessing has explored the sensual realities of feminine life, from sex to motherhood, in her work. She truly revelled in her sexuality, and in Under My Skin she said of being an adolescent girl, "I was conscious every minute of my delicious body, that fits me like a new and longed-for dress." Even in one of her most recent novels, Love, Again, she is surprisingly frank about the experiences of an ageing narrator who finds herself falling for a young man. There is something unfashionably Lawrentian about her unashamed delight in sensual experience.