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- Herausgeber: BrightSummaries.com
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Serie: BrightSummaries.com
- Sprache: Englisch
Unlock the more straightforward side of The Golden Notebook with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!
This engaging summary presents an analysis of
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, which tells the story of Anna Wulf, who is struggling with writer’s block following the publication of her debut and only novel dealing with her experiences living in Africa. She attempts to organise her thoughts in a series of notebooks, each of which represents a different part of her life, before pulling together the various threads of her existence in the golden notebook of the title.
The Golden Notebook is among Doris Lessing’s most acclaimed works, and in 2005 was named by
TIME magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels since 1923.
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The Golden Notebook in a fraction of the time!
This in-depth and informative reading guide brings you:
• A complete plot summary
• Character studies
• Key themes and symbols
• Questions for further reflection
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Seitenzahl: 33
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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DORIS LESSING
ENGLISH NOVELIST AND SHORT STORY WRITER
Born in Kermanshah, Persia in 1919.Died in London in 2013.Notable works:The Grass is Singing (1950), novelThis Was the Old Chief’s Country (1951), short story collectionUnder My Skin (1994), autobiographyBorn in Persia to English parents, Doris had one younger brother, Harry. As a child she lived first in Persia, then in England, and finally in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), where her father started a farm. She never received a formal education. She was highly outspoken about her political views, which also deeply influenced her writing, and always had a cause that she supported. She left home in 1937 and worked in Salisbury (Harare, Zimbabwe), where she married Frank Charles Wisdom, already pregnant by him. They had two children together but divorced in 1943. Doris, by that point, was deeply engaged with the communist movement (but later broke with it) and married the leader of the communist group, the German Jewish refugee Gottfried Lessing, in 1945. They had a son, Peter, but divorced in 1949. She had been publishing stories and poems in journals already and left Southern Rhodesia with Peter in the same year, eventually settling in England. In 1950, the first of her 26 novels, The Grass is Singing, was published. Lessing was exceedingly successful during her lifetime, receiving many prizes and honorary degrees. In 2007 she finally received the Nobel Prize for Literature, shortly after the publication of her novel The Cleft. She was highly experimental in her writing and wrote realist novels as well as science fiction. One of the main influences on her writing was the philosophy of Idries Shah (Sufi author and teacher, 1924-1996).
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
A PORTRAYAL OF THE INFLUENCE OF A DESTRUCTIVE SOCIETY ON THE INDIVIDUAL
Genre: novelReference edition: Lessing, D. (2014) The Golden Notebook. London: Fourth Estate.1stedition: 1962Themes: communism, Soviet Union, African independence, women’s empowerment, second wave feminism, mental illness, writing, 1960sThe Golden Notebook is a highly complex novel and reflects the situation of the 1960s in that it questions the reliability of political assumptions and ways of knowing the world. It revolves around the (ex-)communist writer Anna Wulf, who once wrote a bestselling novel called Frontiers of War. She is suffering from from writer’s block, and records her experience in four different notebooks. Each of the notebooks represents a part of herself, and she tries to portray the truth in them. The novel is separated into a framework novel called “Free Women”, divided up into five parts, which records the lives of Anna and her friend Molly with a (partially insightful) third person narrator. After each of the first four parts of “Free Women”, excerpts from the four notebooks are presented. Before the last part of “Free Women”, Anna writes “The Golden Notebook”, which aims to combine the four parts of herself.
Although Lessing was deeply involved with the communist movement in her early life, she gradually became wary of the movement, a process that was sped up by writing The Golden Notebook (Maslen, 2017: 4). Moreover, the novel deals with a variety of women’s issues and “[…] its exploration of women’s concerns made it the flagship for the new wave feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, something that would always exasperate its author; she never espoused the idea of gender exclusivity.” (ibid.).
