Compare (Lessing's obituary) to the reverent treatment
the Grey Lady gave Lessing’s contemporary John Updike, who had a failed
marriage of his own, wrote enough steamy-pantsed descriptions of
adultery to make a genre out of them and was subjected to torrents of
criticism from feminists and fellow writers alike. Of his notorious and
toxic misogyny, the obituary mildly noted that “some readers complained
about his portrayal of women.” Apparently, the fact that Lessing won the
Nobel and Updike didn't is less important than their respective
genders. Updike, as a man, gets posthumously evaluated in terms of his
work, whereas Lessing, as a woman, is evidently primarily interesting in
terms of her sex life and whether or not everybody thought she was a
nice person.
- Sady Doyle
(True to blogging form, though, Doyle gets the facts wrong: Updike was hardly Lessing's contemporary, as she was born in 1919 and he in 1932. That's a twenty-year age difference, and in fact her two children were born in 1939 and 1943 -- they're closer to being Updike's contemporaries. Her first novel came out in 1950, his in 1959. Need I go on.)
(ETA: I don't mean to criticize Doyle, who is often a pretty good writer, if equally often in real need of an editor. It's just that online writing is almost never fact-checked. It's certainly never proofed by an actual human being -- I've caught I don't know how many typos in giant online newspaper sites -- and even more rarely copyedited. The above is an example of what copyediting is. Query: were Updike and Lessing actual contemporaries? Check. Result: No, not really. Please rephrase.
(I think what Doyle means is their most famous books were roughly contemporary -- Rabbit, Run came out in 1960, Golden Notebook in 1962 -- but even then, she's not getting that one of the reasons the Times might have been more reverent about Updike, besides sexism -- which I wholly agree is part of it -- is that Updike basically grew up in the East Coast literary establishment and was its last Grand Old Man. But that's beyond the scope of copyediting.
(And yes, the publishing world obviously lost a great copyeditor in yours truly when they decided "we don't need proofreaders anymore, we have spell-checkers." I weep for the Oxford comma wars. Oh well.)
descensus Averno facilis est