The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing, 1962

I- Author

Doris May Taylor was born in Persia (Iran) in 1919. Her father was a World War I survivor and a bank clerk and her mother a nurse, both were British. In 1925, her family moved to Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to cultivate maize but this venture proved to be unsuccessful. Meanwhile, her mother intended to give her a strict education, which Doris resented. Instead she found comfort in the surrounding nature with her brother, Harry. She was then sent to the Dominican Convent High School in Salisbury (Harare), a religious all-girls school, but fled at the age of 13. This was the end of her formal education. Because of the difficult relationship she had with her mother, she left her home at the age of 15 and became a nursemaid. At the age of 19, while she was working as a phone operator in Salisbury, she married her first husband, Frank Wisdom. They had two children and divorced in 1943. She then joined a communist book club, the Left Book Club, where she encountered Gottfried Lessing, her second husband, with whom she had a boy. They divorced in 1949 and she fled to London with her youngest child to pursue her writing career. She published her first successful novel the same year, titled The Grass Is Singing. Her career can be divided into three phases: the Communist one (1944-1946) where she dealt with social issues, the psychological one (1956-1969) which produced The Golden Notebook and was an exploration of the human mind, and finally the science fiction one which was quite unpopular. However most of her writings remain autobiographical with the themes of Africa, childhood, politics, social matters, culture, racism and individualism. She won the Nobel Prize of Literature in 2007, amongst many other prizes. Alfred and Emily, her most recent novel, is said to be her very last book by the author herself.

II- Summary

The Golden Notebook deals with the life of a writer, Anna Wulf, in relation with her daughter Janet,