The Golden Notebook is a
1962 novel by
British Nobel Prize-winning 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. The book also contains a powerful anti-war and anti-
Stalinist message, an extended analysis of communism and the Communist Party in England from the 1930s to the 1950s, and a famed examination of the budding sexual and
women's liberation movements.
The Golden Notebook has been translated into a number of other languages
Plot summary
The Golden Notebook 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. The book intersperses segments of an ostensibly realistic narrative of the lives of Molly and Anna, and their children, ex-husbands and lovers--entitled Free Women--with excerpts from Anna's four notebooks, colored black (of Anna's experience in Central Africa, before and during WWII, which inspired her own bestselling novel), red (of her experience as a member of the Communist Party), yellow (an ongoing novel that is being written based on the painful ending of Anna's own love affair), and blue (Anna's personal journal where she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life.). Each notebook is returned to four times, interspersed with episodes from Free Women, creating non-chronological, overlapping sections that interact with one another. This post-modernistic styling, with its space and room for "play" engaging the characters and readers, is among the most famous features of the book, although Lessing insisted that readers and reviewers pay attention to the serious themes in the novel
Major themes
novel's information
Characters
Anna Wulf
Anna is the main character of the novel. All events are seen through her eyes. She is a rather promiscuous, middle-aged woman living off the proceeds of a best selling novel she wrote based on time she spent in Africa. After becoming pregnant, Anna marries Max Wulf, whom she doesn't love. They are married less than one year. Anna raises her daughter, Janet, as a single-mother. After her marriage to Max, Anna becomes involved with a married man. She and Michael have a five-year affair. When this affair ends, Anna is heart-broken and disillusioned. Another facet that adds to Anna's disillusionment is the problems in the communist party, a political party of which she was a member. Anna admits to her friends she feels as if her life is cracking apart.
She keeps a.....
The notebooks of Anna Wulf allow the reader to explore the multi-faceted dimensions of personality and how individuals attempt to make sense of their world. The once-published author discovers that her need to write is both pain and panacea. Representative of her African experience, the Black Notebook is further divided into subdivisions that are labeled "Source" and "Money." Though the left side contains the seminal seeds of Anna's African memories, eventually all that she records appears in the right column, dealing with the business transactions related to her writing about her time...
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