Book Club Guide

The Golden Notebook

by Doris Lessing · 1962 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The difficulty of writing honestly about a fragmented world
Political disillusionment and the aftermath of Communist faith
Womanhood, freedom and the loneliness of the ideologically unhoused

About this book

Anna Wulf, a writer and communist living in 1950s London, keeps four notebooks — black for Africa, red for politics, yellow for her novel, blue for her ordinary life — and attempts to synthesise them into a golden notebook. Lessing's formally radical novel about female consciousness, creative block and political disillusionment was one of the most important feminist novels of the 20th century.

Published in 1962, The Golden Notebook is one of the most formally experimental and thematically ambitious novels of the 20th century. Lessing won the Nobel Prize in 2007, partly on its strength.

Discussion questions

The novel's form — a conventional novel broken apart by four notebooks — is central to its meaning. What is Lessing saying through this structural fragmentation about the relationship between form and content?
Anna keeps four notebooks — black, red, yellow and blue — to separate different aspects of her life. Why does she find integration impossible — and what is the novel saying about the coherence of the self?
The novel was immediately read as a feminist manifesto, which Lessing resisted. How do you read her apparent resistance — and does the novel's feminist content require her endorsement to be real?
The Communist Party is central to Anna's world, and the novel charts her disillusionment with it in detail. What does this political strand add — and can the novel be read without understanding its Cold War context?
The Golden Notebook is formally ambitious and sometimes difficult. How did you experience this difficulty — as productive or as an obstacle?