The Golden Notebook
by Doris Lessing
Summary
Anna Wulf is a writer living in London, and rather than keep one diary she keeps four, each one holding a different, deliberately separated part of her life: a black notebook for her years in colonial Southern Rhodesia before and during the Second World War, material that became her own earlier bestselling novel; a red notebook for her increasingly disillusioned involvement with the Communist Party; a yellow notebook where she reworks the collapse of a love affair as fiction rather than fact; and a blue notebook, closer to a plain journal, where she records dreams, memories and the ordinary texture of her days. Doris Lessing frames all four notebooks inside a fifth narrative, a more conventional novella called Free Women, following Anna and her close friend Molly, an actress, through marriages, children and lovers in a register that looks deceptively plain next to everything surrounding it.
Each notebook returns four separate times across the book, interleaved with sections of Free Women, so the same years of Anna's life get told and retold from different angles rather than moving forward in a single line, a structure built to mirror the fragmentation Lessing wanted the novel to be about, both Anna's own approaching breakdown and a wider disintegration she saw in the postwar world around her. A fifth notebook, golden rather than colored, appears only near the end, where Anna finally tries to bring the separated pieces of herself back into a single account rather than four competing ones, an act of integration the book treats as difficult and only partly successful rather than as a clean resolution.
Lessing wrote the book primarily as an argument about fragmentation and political disillusionment, and was often irritated in later years to find it read almost exclusively as a feminist manifesto about women's sexual and creative independence, a reading she thought flattened everything else the novel was doing. It is a demanding, structurally unusual novel that suits a reader willing to hold four overlapping versions of one woman's life in mind at once, and it remains, however Lessing herself felt about the label, one of the twentieth century's most influential novels about a woman's inner life.
Historical Context & Significance
The Swedish Academy gave Doris Lessing the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature, describing her as that epicist of the female experience who, with skepticism, fire and visionary power, has subjected a divided civilization to scrutiny. The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, is the novel most responsible for that description and remains her most widely read book, named to Time magazine's 2005 list of the hundred best English language novels published since 1923.
Lessing was out shopping when the Nobel announcement broke and came home to find reporters already waiting outside her door; her first recorded reaction was Oh Christ, followed by a wry note that she had now won every prize going, a royal flush. Days short of her eighty eighth birthday, she became the oldest person yet chosen for the literature prize. She later called the attention that followed something close to a disaster for her ability to work, even while acknowledging the money eased her final years, and she remained ambivalent about the novel's feminist reputation for the rest of her life, noting that the gains it was credited with helping win had reached some women far more than others.