Doris Lessing

Earth and air take three of her ten planets each, with two apiece in fire and water, and four of the ten are fixed. Venus, Mars and Saturn fill nine degrees of Virgo. The record says Lessing won the Nobel Prize at eighty seven and heard about it from reporters on her doorstep, to which she said: oh Christ, and that The Golden Notebook became a foundational feminist text she resisted that reading of.

The Sun sits in easy contact with Uranus at an orb of zero, the same degree and the same arcminute, in signs a third of the circle apart. Most of the zeroes in this project are two slow planets and therefore belong to everybody born across those years. This one is a personal planet against a slow one, so it is hers. The reading is independence without a fight: people who are unusual and untroubled by being unusual, and sudden opportunities that suit them.

Both halves of that land on this record. A novelist who answered a Nobel Prize with oh Christ, and who spent decades declining the reading other people had settled on for her best known book, is somebody untroubled by being out of step, and a prize at eighty seven is a sudden opportunity by any measure. That is about as close as a chart in this project has come to describing a temperament the record then demonstrates twice in two sentences, and the orb is the reason it is worth printing rather than the agreement.

The Moon sits sixty degrees from Neptune at under a quarter of a degree, empathy that costs nothing: kindness, imagination, and an ease with art, with its sign certain at eleven degrees of Libra. Mars sits conjunct Saturn at just over a degree inside the Virgo group, controlled force: discipline, stamina, and somebody who works long past the point where other people stop, which for a writing life of that length is the second useful reading here. Uranus and Pluto were the two retrograde planets. She died in London on 17 November 2013, at ninety four. One contact came inside half a degree that day, Saturn square her natal Jupiter at under four tenths, and the Moon was one hundred per cent lit, carrying the phase reading that refines, questions and improves, and rarely calls anything finished.