Doris May Lessing, The Golden Notebook

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The Golden Notebook

is probably Doris Lessing’s most famous novel. Published in 1962, it was acclaimed for its use of an involuted structure which interrogates the novel form. The novel was also prescient in its exploration of therapeutic journeys into madness. Other dominant themes are the shaping pressure of language within social groups, and the acknowledgement of areas of female sexuality which were previously largely taboo.

The Golden Notebook

also convincingly presents the ideological climate of London during the 1950s, a decade in which the British Communist Party strongly influenced Socialism and Left Wing politics before the party’s inexorable decline, fuelled by recrimination and revelations after the death of Stalin in 1953. The decade of the fifties was extraordinarily…

2923 words

Citation: Scullion, Val. "The Golden Notebook". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 October 2003 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=722, accessed 13 December 2024.]

722 The Golden Notebook 3 Historical context notes are intended to give basic and preliminary information on a topic. In some cases they will be expanded into longer entries as the Literary Encyclopedia evolves.

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