Under My Skin is the first volume of Doris Lessing’s autobiography, covering her life from childhood through to 1949.

Colonial Rhodesia, early marriages, political awakening, and the formation of a writer’s discipline, Lessing is attentive to her own blind spots, ideological errors, and emotional limits, especially in relation to communism, motherhood, and power.

Read now, it functions as both a personal document and a record of twentieth-century intellectual formation under empire.