From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Golden Notebook is a 1962 novel by British author Doris Lessing. This book, as well as the couple that followed it, enters the realm of what Margaret Drabble in The Oxford Companion to English Literature has called Lessing's "inner space fiction," her work that explores mental and societal breakdown. It is the story of writer Anna Wulf, the four notebooks in which she keeps the record of her life, and her attempt to tie them all together in a fifth, gold-colored notebook. After the opening realistic section, ironically called "Free Women," the book fragments into Anna's four notebooks and each notebook is returned to four times, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections. The black notebook is for Anna's memories of her life in Central Africa, which inspired her own best-selling novel; the red one for her experiences with the British Communist Party; the yellow one for a fiction she writes that is based on the painful ending of her own love affair; and the blue one for recording her memories, dreams, and emotional life. All four notebooks and the frame narrative testify to women's struggles with the conflicts of work, sex, love, maternity, and politics. This kind of novel became popular among English writers during the 1960s. In them, the novelist is interested in the process of writing and the finished product.
