The Golden Notebook (Collins Modern Classics)

(Paperback)

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The landmark novel by Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing a powerful account of a woman searching for her personal, political and professional identity while facing rejection and betrayal.
Anna Wulf is a young novelist with writers block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. Fearing the onset of madness, she records her experiences in four coloured notebooks. The black notebook addresses her problems as a writer; the red her political life; the yellow her relationships and emotions; and the blue becomes a diary of everyday events. But it is the fifth notebook the Golden Notebook which is the key to her recovery and renaissance.

Bold and illuminating, fusing sex, politics, madness and motherhood, The Golden Notebook is at once a wry and perceptive portrait of the intellectual and moral climate of the 1950s a society on the brink of feminism and a powerful and revealing account of a woman searching for her own personal and political identity.

Reviews

This ambitious novel has no equal. Guardian

At the beginning of the Sixties, this vast, frank, complicated novel helped to sustain our reputation for courageous, ambitious, experimental writing. Soon a worldwide bestseller, it is still Lessings finest work. The Golden Notebook captured the heady mix of the early Sixties, when not just novels but political certainties were dissolving. The rising feminist movement seized it as a Bible. Mail on Sunday

Her greatest workShows the power of the female imagination at full throttle. It doesn't bear a simple political message but it does rip off the masks that women were accustomed to wearing, and it shows up the dangers and difficulties that women encounter if they try to live a free life in a man's worldA landmark novel, a book that both changed and explained a generationOne of the finest writers of the century. Independent

Doris Lessing is a pioneer of feminist self-consciousness in its raw stateThe truths contained in The Golden Notebook are indeed harsh. It can also be said that these particular truths have not been examined in so rigorous and exemplary a fashion since the first appearance of this extraordinary book. A seminal work. Anita Brookner, LRB

The Golden Notebook is the diary of a writer in shock, a young woman determined to forge a life as a free woman, as an intellectual. Doris Lessing is a writer of considerable power, someone who can close her eyes and give a situation by the sheer force of her emotional energy. Joan Didion, New York Times

Author Bio

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". She died in 2013.