The Golden Notebook Year First Published: 1962 First Published by: Simon and Schuster Category: Novel This Edition: American first edition

From the book jacket:

The Golden Notebook is the kind of novel every publisher waits for impatiently - a major work by a major talent. It is surely on of the most important English novels of our time.

Here in this labyrinth of overwhelmingly real stories is the full, complex story of a modern woman, Anna - a woman who will be talked about as were Ibsen's and Shaw's "new women" when the first appeared.

Anna tries to live with the freedom of a man. She is a writer, author of one very successful novel, who now keeps four notebooks. In one with a black cover she reviews the African experience of her earlier years. In a red one she records her political life, her disillusionment with Communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which her heroine relives part of her own experience. And in a blue one she keeps a personal diary. Finally, in love with an American writer, threatened with insanity, Anna tries to bring the threads of all four books together in a golden notebook.

With these various thread of her story - her life - Anna weaves a shatteringly vivid tapestry of contemporary concerns. Never for a moment can you doubt the validity of her testament. Documentary precision combines with deep narrative art to reveal the truth of being an intelligent woman. Her conclusions are likely to be debated for generations.

This book received the 1976 French Prix Medicis for Foreigners

The Golden Notebook Project

An experiment in close-reading in which seven women are reading the book and conducting a conversation in the margins. You can read along and discuss online. click here

• British Edition
  
• Audio: Doris Lessing Reads The Golden Notebook (excerpts)