The Golden Notebook: Perennial Classics Edition - Softcover

Lessing, Doris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 006093140X ISBN 13: 9780060931407

Publisher: HarperPerennial, 1999

Synopsis

Anna 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 records her political life, her disillusionment with Communism. In a yellow one she writes a novel in which the 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.

About this title

Review

""The Golden Notebook" is Doris Lessing's most important work and has left its mark upon the ideas and feelings of a whole generation of women." -- Elizabeth Hardwick, "New York Times Book Review""The most absorbing and exciting piece of new fiction I have read in a decades; it moves with the beat of our time, and it is true." -- Irving Howe, "New Republic""No ordinary work of fiction...The technique, in a word, is brilliant." -- "Saturday Review"

From the Back Cover

Anna Wulf is a young novelist with writer’s block. Divorced, with a young child, and disillusioned by unsatisfactory relationships, she feels her life is falling apart. In fear 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.

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperPerennial
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 006093140X
• ISBN 13: 9780060931407
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 672