Every year I would think to myself, who would I like to win the Nobel prize for literature? And most of my own personal nominees were either dead or not quite of the stature of a Nobel prizewinner, and very often not male enough. Or they’d won it already. But I would often think, quite wistfully, of Doris Lessing, that if she were awarded the prize, that would be a worthy recognition by my own Nobel standards (Steinbeck, Pasternak, Seamus Heaney). But she was passed over so often, and was getting on, and it seemed as if she were going to get it, she would have got it by now. I assumed those gentlemen in Stockholm found her too little of a lady to their liking: too feisty and feminist, her work most definitely not male enough.

I had tears in my eyes this morning when I saw she had won the prize. It’s not that she’s my favorite author; it was the sense of justice being done, at last, of there being some hope for women in the world. For a number of reasons. To be fair, the Nobel prize committee has improved over the last 15 years, in giving four prizes to women (Morrison, Gordimer, Szymborska and Jelinek), but before that, there were only six altogether in nearly a hundred years…you do the gender math.

So this was one reason for hope, that the percentage of women whose work is acknowledged is increasing. Also, that much of her work deals with women’s lives and domesticity, hardly themes dear to male writers except when the women are catalysts or objects of men’s behavior, etc etc. Another reason is perhaps the very nature of the winner herself: a woman who all her life has flown in the face of convention, has done things on her own terms. Not that her Nobel women predecessors didn’t, but I sense their work matches more closely a man’s sensibility, honoring the committee’s criteria for what makes outstanding literature, even the outrageously depressing Jelinek…

I fell in love with Lessing’s work back in the 1970s, because she opened a world to me. The Grass is Singing, the Martha Quest books, The Summer before the Dark, The Golden Notebook, are all books I still remember, books that shaped my still impressionable twentysomething mind. They were strange and exotic in style and setting, but what was deeply familiar was the psychology: the sense of being on a planet where one would never fully belong, where all the rules and structures had been predetermined by men, and the best one could hope for was to meet nice men who would both protect one and allow one some freedom. I was living through a stifling relationship at the time, and I would escape into her words for comfort. I came back out again confused, but grateful, because she had shown me it was all right—it was imperative—to rebel. That same summer when someone stole both an amber ring and my copy of Summer before the Dark, I was more upset at the loss of the book.

Lessing went beyond just gender politics, she challenged race and capitalism and imperialism, expanding her borders as a woman by participating fully in the male world, at least on paper. And beyond the real world too: she had a vision in Shikasta that has also stayed with me, however little I like “science fiction,” of a world filled with justice and love, as if the genes for violence and greed had finally been eradicated from our bodies. Maybe this vision seems sentimental, in retrospect, but because of my very resistance to science fiction, I trusted it; it worked for me.

She wrote other things I didn’t like (The Good Terrorist), and at times I thought she was searching too hard for subject matter, but this was because of her ever-curious mind, her need to understand and inspire change in people, in her readers. She played an admirable prank on the publishing industry, submitting two serious manuscripts under a pen name then exposing the venal practices of editors once they had roundly rejected her.

Most recently I read a series of novellas, The Grandmothers, and admired the sharpness of her prose, and her emotional recall; one of the stories, A Love Child, recaptures all the anguish of youth, of love and fear and separation and obsession, as vividly as if she had just lived it herself. Which is a hopeful thing too, to have her as this wonderful role model, when you’re not getting any younger yourself, living proof that the life of the mind does not age.

(There is also an utterly trivial reason why I’m pleased, Doris Lessing loves cats, and has written three books about them…)

Above all it is the feeling that beyond gender a certain sensibility has been rewarded. And if you have ever known a book to change your life, you cannot help but feel that there is some hope and justice and understanding in the world, after all, when Doris Lessing wins the Nobel prize.