In her 88th year the power to shock has not deserted Doris Lessing, once regarded as a communist firebrand. The explicit language of her latest novel so offended a female proofreader that she refused to continue working on it.

Lessing’s novel is the mythological story of women known as the Clefts, who live free from sexual intrigue and men, only bearing female children, until their harmony is shattered by the birth of male offspring, the Squirts. Both names refer to reproductive equipment.

“I’ll tell you precisely what she hated,” Lessing says unsparingly. “She hated the word ‘cleft’. She said she found it very ugly and demeaning. I don’t see why. She hated it even more than the word ‘squirt’.”

Small and commanding, her grey hair drawn back into a bun, Lessing reminds me of a wise old Iroquois woman named Caroline who was convinced the world would turn over one day, leaving only ants and native Americans alive. That would be all right with Lessing, who observed recently that mankind was an unattractive species and it might be “better if it all ends”.

Piles of books and newspapers, presided over by a striking black cat, dominate the sitting room at her west Hampstead home in north London. Her bones, she is wont to complain, have the consistency of chalk, but she moves around nimbly and her mind remains as sharp as a tack.

With a cascade of fiction, poetry, and drama, she belongs to a cabal of women writers — including Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Naomi Mitchison and Nadine Gordimer — whose writing defined the latter half of the 20th century and whose lives broke every convention.

Her readers are divided between those who love her novel The Golden Notebook, considered a feminist classic (but not by the author), and those who prefer her “science fiction” writing, said to be responsible for her removal from the Nobel prize’s unofficial list.

Science fiction has provided Lessing and other feminist authors, notably Margaret Atwood, with an ideal vehicle to create literary utopias and challenge male assumptions.

Yet it is difficult at first to establish how serious she is about the idea of a self-perpetuating female society. Modern scientists declare that such reproduction among humans is unviable, with the notable exception of Jesus. Yet the virgin births of four Komodo dragons at London Zoo have reignited a debate about how such a mechanism is triggered.

It turns out that Lessing is deadly serious: “I think men were a new invention. They have new ideas, but they’re erratic, you can’t count on them. They haven’t settled down yet. You have to agree, there’s a kind of solidity about women. They’re sort of heavy and rooted, even if we don’t think like that.”

She hopes it’s not too late for evolution to add something to men’s chromosomes to stabilise them. Would it be so much fun? She sidesteps the question. “I’m just counting on nature to come up with something extraordinary, I don’t know what.”

Her clan of virgin women are so horrified by their male offspring they call them monsters and Squirts. Is this the same author who complained that young men were being “cowed” by feminists?

She looks shocked by the suggestion that she has disparaged men. “There’s no judgment of men. If women had been producing clefts for centuries and they give birth to a boy they would call it a monster. Well, you must have seen a baby boy: it’s all genitals. It’s quite a shock when you have a baby boy.”

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