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Some novelists take years to get into their stride, but it is true of Doris Lessing that if you want to understand her, and feel the full power of her imagination, you have to read her first book, which was published in 1950. The Grass is Singing is a story set in Africa, where she grew up, where she experienced unhappiness and political radicalization, and where she decided to be writer. More than half a century later Lessing had become a Nobel Laureate with dozens of books behind her, even an opera with Philip Glass.

The Grass is Singing takes you to the kind of rolling landscape and bush where her father farmed in Southern Rhodesia, a generation before it became Zimbabwe, and where she developed a passionate desire to see an end to colonialism. The novel is an uncompromising journey into a world of fear and racial segregation where violence is as familiar as the wind that makes the grass sing. It’s a story of murder – committed by a black houseboy on the white woman to whom he is in effect a slave, but who is so fascinated and drawn to him that it nearly becomes an obsession – and a sharp-edged picture of the world, which she knew, that made the tragedy almost inevitable. Moses, the murderer, and Mary Turner, his victim, are both destroyed by the way in which they have to live. The book trembles with passion, like this: ‘When a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment, and he brings down the whip.’

Lessing had lived in Africa from 1925, when her father bought 1,000 acres in the bush and took his family from Persia, now Iran, where Doris had been born six years earlier. She experienced a childhood which she has often described as unhappy, and one of its main components was solitude. From an early age her life involved rejection, first of a community in which she watched people being demeaned and then of the Marxist solution which she thought, for a while, might be the answer. ‘What fools we were!’ she said long afterwards about her ten years or so in the Communist Party.

Her first marriage ended and she left her husband and two children for Gottfried Lessing, whom she’d met at a Communist book club. They had a son together but were divorced in 1949 when she decided to move to London to pursue her writing career, taking her son with her. The government of Southern Rhodesia would later accuse her of ‘subversive activities’ for arguing that the black population was being exploited, and she was labelled a prohibited immigrant. A phase of her life was over. It had begun in the shadow of the First World War, in which her father lost a leg: she saw him as representative of a whole generation who had been ruined by war. Africa also saddened her and made her angry. London was to be a new start.

As a writer, however, she continued to refuse to be confined, and that has been her spirit from the beginning. In The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, she wrote about a woman undergoing a breakdown – in a world that seems to be breaking from its moorings – and presented an unforgettable picture of her efforts to compartmentalize her life to deal with its disintegration. The novelist Margaret Drabble, one of the British writers from the sixties influenced strongly by feminist ideas, has said of the book: ‘Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos. She managed to make sense of her material, but at enormous risk.’ The unsayable, among other things, was to talk about menstruation in the way that James Joyce had talked of masturbation and shaken Ireland, and also to subject to meticulous scrutiny the pressures and desires, and the trade-offs they demanded, experienced by women of the early sixties. All that, and around them a world in which leftist progressives were having to cope with the Russians’ own revelations and denunciation of Stalinist terror. Bleakness unconfined.

Drabble pointed out that in The Golden Notebook Lessing was simultaneously progressive and conservative. When Anna, the main character, who is a writer, is discussing orgasm and the rights and wrongs of sex with a man whom she doesn’t love, her Jungian analyst promotes a view that is traditionalist about sexual loyalty rather than radically modern and free-thinking. The book’s power lies in its relentless, page-by-page denunciation of simplistic thinking. No doubt that is why it unsettled so many people who recognized it for the radical text that it was and then found it unexpectedly disturbing.

When Lessing wrote The Golden Notebook this novel was controversial, not least among women critics, for some of whom, in the course of a few years, it would become something of an inspiration and almost a fictional textbook for feminism. Just as she had refused to be confined by the effective apartheid of her upbringing, and then by too rigid a political reaction to it, she was not going to be turned into an icon, or even a heroine, by anyone.

Much later, in the nineties, she spoke in an interview about her regular arguments with feminists for whom she was an inspiration on the page but an irritation in the flesh. She caused a furore at the Edinburgh book festival in 2001 by suggesting that too many men were being given a hard time by women, and that they deserved less bashing: ‘I have nothing in common with feminists because of their inflexibility. They never seem to think that one might like men, or enjoy them.’ She came to believe that what she called ‘the rubbishing of men’ had become part of contemporary culture and she was having none of it.

Her refusal ever to be dragooned into a cause, or stuck in a rut, meant that she has never felt pressured to say ‘the right thing’. She was asked by Time magazine about Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and said she would never go back because he was ‘a monstrous little terror … who had created a caste, a layer of people just like himself who are corrupt and crooked’. And then, for good measure, explaining how she believed the country had been ruined, she said: ‘Under the whites it was an extremely efficient country. It could grow absolutely everything. We had railways and post offices and roads and water that worked. You can’t just put that back overnight.’

So the young woman whose first writing had revealed her horror was willing to reflect on the experience in a way that few others, radicalized in colonial Africa, would find it easy to do. Lessing’s mark has always been a refusal to follow a predictable line of argument, and not to care very much what others are making of it.

Just as she rejected the politics that first attracted her in forties Africa, where she thought everything hopeless under a status quo that couldn’t last, so she would not go down the road with some of those who used The Golden Notebook as an inspiration, as she once put it to the New York Times in a way that was semi-religious: ‘They want me to bear witness,’ she said. ‘What they would really like me to say is “Ha, sisters, I stand with you side by side in your struggle towards the golden dawn where all those beastly men are no more.” Do they really want people to make oversimplified statements about men and women? In fact, they do. I’ve come with great regret to this conclusion.’

Although her antennae have retained a sensitive feeling for injustice – she has written of the uphill struggle of women in Pakistan and Afghanistan, for example – she preferred, after the sixties, to shift her focus to a place that was mystical rather than part of the world. In The Golden Notebook, Anna, in the course of trying to sort herself out, expresses interest in mysticism, and it was a clue to the path that Lessing herself would follow. She became interested in the mystic Islamic practice of Sufism. More than 1,000 years ago it was practised as a way of counteracting what was seen even then – though not in these words – as a preoccupation with the material world, the here and now. So many of Lessing’s themes, in books set in different places, in different times, have concerned a means of escape (or self-realization) that it was, in retrospect, quite a natural thing, although surprising at the time. And few of those who were moved and inspired by The Golden Notebook would have expected its author, within ten years, to turn her attention to science fiction. That is what she did.

For twenty years she was writing books which touched on mystical ways of thinking, and in the middle of that period she published a five-book sequence – Canopus in Argos: Archives – set in a fictional galactic empire. In it she explored the idea which so attracted her: that individuals can find satisfaction and succour in working for a universal rather an individual good.

Lessing’s place in the novelists’ hall of fame – she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007 – came about in part because of that ability to inhabit different fictional worlds with a surefootedness that seemed unique. She was capable of travelling back from the galaxy of Canopus in 1985, for example, to write The Good Terrorist, which explored the ambiguities of a middle-class woman, converted to terrorism. It was a book ahead of its time, dealing with subjects that would become near-obsessions of writers of fiction two decades later. That easy breadth, the ability to move from the mystical to the horribly rational, has always been her special power: in her eighties she was writing novels about a love of cats, in The Old Age of El Magnifico, and about the grown-up years of Ben, the social misfit, whom she had introduced in a book twenty years before.

Running through it all has been a commitment to the business of literature that has given Lessing a special status among other writers. She began to write in the forties, published first in the fifties, and has been moving and startling her readers ever since. It’s a trade she cares about. In the 1980s she wrote two books under a pseudonym – Jane Somers – to show how difficult it is to be published, and for unknown writers to start to do what she had done. They not only had difficulty being published, but didn’t sell well.

It’s maybe the mark of Doris Lessing that where other writers might have been embarrassed or irritated by that, she was pleased. In her nineties, after a lifetime’s work at it, she is still determined to resist group thinking, being drawn along. She remains her own woman, and has made her point.