Doris Lessing Was Rejected by Her Own Publisher
Quick answer: In 1983 Doris Lessing submitted a novel as unknown writer Jane Somers. Her own publisher rejected it. What her experiment proved about rejection and luck.
Picture a rejection letter arriving for a novelist who would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Now make it stranger: the letter comes from her own publisher, turning down a manuscript she wrote at the height of her powers, because the name on the title page was not hers. In 1983 Doris Lessing, then one of the most famous novelists in the English language, submitted a new novel under the invented name Jane Somers. The publishing house that had built its reputation partly on her books said no.
Lessing had planned it as an experiment, and the results were bleaker and more instructive than even she expected. No other rejection story tells a working writer quite so much, because this one removes every excuse. The manuscript was good. The author was a master. Only the name changed, and the name changed everything.
Why a famous writer chose to become nobody
By the early 1980s Lessing had been publishing for more than three decades. The Grass Is Singing had made her name in 1950, and The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, had made her a landmark figure. She had also grown suspicious of her own reputation. Reviewers, she felt, no longer read her books; they read her name and reacted to it, for or against, before the first page.
So she wrote a novel about an ageing magazine editor who befriends a poor elderly woman, called it The Diary of a Good Neighbour, and sent it out as the work of Jane Somers, an unknown. She later explained her two motives openly: she wanted to escape the cage of being Doris Lessing, and she wanted to demonstrate what actually happens to talented new writers with no name, no track record and no friends in the building.
What actually happened to Jane Somers
Jonathan Cape, the London house closely associated with Lessing's career, rejected the manuscript. Granada rejected it too; accounts of the episode record that one reader found it too depressing to sell, and it has often been reported, with some irony, that the writing struck at least one reader as reminiscent of Doris Lessing. The book that a Nobel-calibre novelist had written could not get past the front desk without her name attached.
It was eventually taken by Michael Joseph in Britain, the same house that had published her debut more than thirty years earlier, where the publisher is reported to have noticed the resemblance to Lessing's work, and by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. Published in 1983 as the work of Jane Somers, it received the standard treatment for an unknown midlist author: a modest print run, scattered reviews and small sales, figures in the low thousands in Britain according to the accounts Lessing herself endorsed. A second Somers novel, If the Old Could, followed in 1984 and met the same polite shrug.
The reveal, and what it proved
In 1984 Lessing disclosed the truth, and the two books were reissued in one volume as The Diaries of Jane Somers, this time carrying her real name and a preface explaining the experiment. The same text that had drifted quietly out of print now received attention, reprints and translation. Nothing about the words had changed.
Lessing was careful about what she claimed. The experiment did not prove that publishing is a conspiracy, and she did not pretend the Somers books were her greatest work. What it demonstrated, cleanly, is that a manuscript's reception depends heavily on the frame around it: the name, the track record, the expectations. Editors and reviewers are busy people processing enormous piles, and an unknown name lowers every probability at every stage. She had suspected as much. Now she had receipts.
The part of the story people skip
It is worth pausing on how the story is usually told, because the popular version quietly inflates it. Lessing's own publisher rejected the book: true, and documented. But the book did find a publisher, on merit, without the famous name. Michael Joseph and Knopf both said yes to Jane Somers. The system was biased, not sealed. Good work by an unknown got through; it simply got through smaller, slower and with far less noise.
That distinction matters for how you use this story. If you conclude that unknown writers are doomed, you have learned the wrong lesson and given yourself a comfortable reason to stop submitting. The accurate lesson is harsher and more hopeful at once: as an unknown you will be rejected by people who would accept the same pages from a name, and you will still get through somewhere if the work is strong and you keep it moving.
What a working writer can take from this
First, stop reading rejection as a verdict on quality. Lessing's experiment is the cleanest evidence in modern publishing that a no often measures the market position of your name, the mood of a slush pile and plain luck, not the worth of the sentences. That does not license arrogance; it licenses persistence. The correct response to a rejection is usually to send the work somewhere else the same week.
Second, notice what Lessing did with her frustration. She did not write an angry essay about reviewers; she designed a test, ran it, and accepted what it showed, including the parts that flattered nobody. A writer can borrow that experimental spirit at any scale: try the poem under a different title, in a different order, at a different kind of venue, and watch what actually changes. Contests that read blind are one of the few arenas where the Jane Somers problem disappears entirely, since nobody scoring the page knows your name. Writory's monthly contest works that way, judging creativity, emotion, structure, language and theme on the page alone, which is exactly the level field Lessing had to invent a fake person to find.
Where this fits in Lessing's long game
The Somers episode was a mid-career detour in a life defined by stubborn range: realist novels, political fiction, memoir and a plunge into science fiction with the Canopus in Argos sequence that baffled many of her admirers. She kept none of the loyalty a brand demands, and it cost her fashionable approval more than once.
The long game paid. In 2007, at 88, she won the Nobel Prize in Literature, at the time the oldest person to receive it. The footage of her hearing the news from reporters on her doorstep, shopping bags in hand and profoundly unimpressed, is a fitting coda for a writer who spent a career refusing to be managed. Start with The Golden Notebook, then read The Diaries of Jane Somers with this story in mind; the preface alone is a free masterclass in how publishing actually works.
What poets can take from this
- Treat any single rejection as data about one desk on one day, never as a measurement of your talent.
- Keep every finished piece in circulation; the Somers books succeeded only because they kept moving after the first two rejections.
- Favour blind-judged contests and magazines when you have no name, because they neutralise the exact bias Lessing exposed.
- Run small experiments with your own work: change the title, the opening stanza or the venue, and track what actually alters the response.
- Build a track record in small steps; the frame around your name is capital, and it compounds.
- Reread a rejected piece a month later before revising, so you edit the writing rather than your bruised mood.
Try it yourself
Write a poem in the voice of a manuscript sitting in a slush pile, addressed to the reader who is about to pick it up. Let the poem know things about its author that the reader will never see.
Questions
Why did Doris Lessing use the pseudonym Jane Somers?
She gave two reasons: she wanted to be reviewed without the weight of her famous name, and she wanted to show how difficult publishing is for unknown writers. She described the experiment in her preface to The Diaries of Jane Somers after revealing the truth in 1984.
Which publishers rejected the Jane Somers novel?
Jonathan Cape, closely associated with Lessing's own career, turned it down, and so did Granada. Michael Joseph in Britain and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States accepted it, and The Diary of a Good Neighbour appeared under the Somers name in 1983.
How did the Jane Somers books sell before the reveal?
Modestly, as is typical for unknown authors: small print runs, limited review coverage and sales reported in the low thousands in Britain. After Lessing revealed her authorship in 1984, the same books were reissued under her name and reached a far larger readership.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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