THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK

The Golden Notebook (1962) The longest and the most ambitious work Doris Lessing has ever attempted to write. It's a masterprice in portraiture of the manners, aspirations, anxieties and the particular problems of the times in which she lives. A daring narrative experiment, in which the multiple selves of a contemporary woman are rendered in astonishing deph and detail.

Instantly became a staple of the feminist movement when it was published in 1962. Doris Lessing's novel deconstructs the life of Anna Wulf, a sometime Communist and a deeply leftish writer living in postward London with her small daughter, Anna is battling writer's block and, it often seems, the damaging chaos of life itself. The elements that made the blook remarkable when it first appeared--extremely candid sexual and phsycological descriptions of its characters and a fractured postmodern structure--are no longer shocking. Nevertheless, The Golden Notebook has retained a great deal of power, chiefly due to its often brutal honesty and the sheer variation and sweep of its prose.

Mrs. Lessing says: "About five years ago I found myself thinking about that novel which most writers are tempted to write at some time or another - about the problems of a writer, about the artistic sensibility. I saw no point in writing this again: it has been one of the major themes of the novel in our time.

Yet, having decided not to write it, I continued to think about it, and about the reasons why artists now have to combat various kinds of narcissism.I found that, if it were to be written at all, the subject should be, not a practising artist, but an artist with some kind of a block which prevented him or her from creating. In describing the reasons for the block, I would also be making the criticism I wanted to make about our society. I would be describing a disgust and self-division which afflicts people now, and not only artists."

"Simultaneously I was working out another book, a book of literary criticism, which I would write not as a critic, but as practising writer, using various literary styles in such a way that the shape of the book and the yuxtaposition of the styles would provide the critisism.This book would say what I wanted of life; it would make implicity, a statement about what Marxists call alienation."

"This novel, then, is an attempt to break a form; to break certains forms of consciousness and go beyond them. While writing it, I found I did not believe some of the things I thought I believe; or rather, than I hold in my mind at the same time beliefs and ideas that are apparently contradictory. Why not? We are after all living in the middle of a whirlwind."