The Golden Notebook

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 1-4

Part 3

Part 4, Chapters 1-4

Part 5

Part 6, Chapters 1-4

Part 7

Part 8, Chapters 1-4

Part 9

Part 10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Socio-Historical Context: The Pervasiveness of War

Lessing was born during World War I—her father was a veteran whose leg was amputated; her mother was his nurse—who lived through World War II, as well as the many wars which followed, including the Cold War. The Golden Notebook itself is intimately concerned with war and its aftermath, particularly World War II. Following the author’s lead, this guide refers to World War II as “the war,” a convention that illustrates how all-encompassing “the war” was for those who lived through it. Molly’s house, in Free Women, had been “laid open by a bomb towards the end of the war” (47), and Anna’s newspaper clippings—which she pastes in her notebooks and pins to the walls of her rooms—almost all have to do with war.

This, in part, explains Anna’s (and, concomitantly, Lessing’s) commitment to communism: At the time, embracing communism was a way of opposing the fascism of Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. Unfortunately, the excesses of Stalin’s Soviet Union eroded the faith that communism might be a corrective to the corrupting powers of history. Anna’s political disillusionment is linked directly to the revelations about Stalin’s unprecedented abuses of power.

The Cold War also features prominently. In 1950s England, where most of the novel is set, Anna and her group become suspect because of their communist sympathies: “Of course all the discussion clubs, groups, etc., died when the Cold War began and any sort of interest in China and the Soviet Union became suspect instead of fashionable” (67). Anna also records several mentions of McCarthyism in America; the “blacklisting” of suspected communists became common practice at the time. Named for the Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, the “Red Scare” deprived many people of their livelihoods and stripped away freedom of speech. Anna pastes several articles connected to this in her notebooks.

However, Anna’s primary fear—shared by Molly—is that all of this is leading to another conflagration, a World War III. Having lived through “the war,” Anna cannot quite believe that peace will be forthcoming. This is part of what fuels her disavowal of her first novel, with its “nostalgia for death” (287), and what makes her question the merits of writing another. After all, she thinks, art cannot hold up in the face of massive historical forces that lead to endless war.

Literary Context: Structure Speaks

One of the most striking aspects of The Golden Notebook is its structure: not only does it contain the many notebooks kept by the protagonist, Anna, but it also contains a novel within the novel, Free Women, as well as a partially completed novel, The Shadow of the Third, not to mention multiple ideas for other short stories and novels. Lessing herself said, in her introduction to the rerelease of the novel, “if the book were shaped in the right way it would make its own comment about the conventional novel” (xiii). That is, Lessing was attempting—like James Joyce before her—to disrupt the traditional form of the novel. Part of the purpose of The Golden Notebook is to question the conventions of literature itself, and the novel in particular. In this way, the unconventional structure of the novel becomes part of the story itself (see Themes: Novels Within Novels: Story as Structure).

As the separate notebooks come to an end, Anna talks to her therapist, Mrs. Marks, about her writing career. Mrs. Marks has been encouraging Anna to write again, though Anna is resistant. When Mrs. Marks questions her on why she has been refusing to write, Anna says that not all books are meant to be read by the general public: “It’s a question of form,” she says, and then goes on to claim that most people “can’t stand formlessness” (474). Anna is suggesting what Lessing is actually doing: The traditional standards of literature, of novel writing, can no longer deliver meaning—not in the face of such world-changing events as World War II. The rules have changed.

Ultimately, the structure of The Golden Notebook is as important as the story itself. The need to compartmentalize is overcome by the need for unity; hence, the black, red, yellow, and blue notebooks coalesce into the golden notebook. Again, Lessing herself writes in the introduction:

[T]he book is alive and potent and fructifying and able to promote thought and discussion only when its plan and shape and intention are not understood, because that moment of seeing the shape and plan and intention is also the moment when there isn’t anything more to be got out of it (xxii).

In confounding her audience, Lessing provides her most profound message. This is a new era, with new ideas, new experiments, and a new way of thinking. Perhaps this will break the cycle of history that has led to war after war after war.

Authorial Context: Lessing and Early Autofiction

In many respects, the events of the novel—as well as the character of Anna herself—mirror Lessing and her own life: She was, in fact, raised in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and agitated against the “colour bar” as a member of the communist party. Lessing is also the author of an early book, The Grass Is Singing, which contains essentially the same plot as Anna’s first novel, Frontiers of War. Lessing herself famously disavowed her first novel as being overly sentimental and romanticized, just as the reader finds Anna struggling with her own novel in the notebooks. There are numerous other resonances, as well. The Golden Notebook can be read as an exercise in autofiction (more than a decade before the literary term was coined) and a masterful examination of how to overcome both social strictures and writer’s block.

It is also ironic that Anna Wulf has written a novel about herself, Free Women, just as Lessing has basically written a novel about herself, in fictionalized form. While Anna’s experiences differ from Lessing’s in minute ways—she only visits Africa for a time while Lessing was raised there—the similarities are significant. In addition, in exploring Lessing’s canon of published work, one can find the repetition of themes that concern Anna: the problem of fragmentation and the desire for unity; the dissolving of traditional boundaries, especially between men and women; and a deep antipathy for the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century.

In her introduction to the reissue of the novel, 10 years after it was first published, Lessing effectively declares that the work is autobiographical: “Writing about oneself, one is writing about others, since your problems, pains, pleasures, emotions—and your extraordinary and remarkable ideas—can’t be yours alone” (xiii). In this way, she is invested in “making the personal general” and “transforming a private experience […] into something much larger” (xiii). That is, even though the novel could be considered autobiographical, Lessing was interested in speaking to larger issues that impacted the 20th century and beyond.