The Golden Notebook: First Impact and Revisionary Reading

Abstract

Two big things happened to me in 1962: I got married and I read The Golden Notebook. I can’t now quite remember which happened first but they certainly flow together in my memory and even seem inseparable now. Doris Lessing says in her 1971 Preface to the book that it “was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation” and points out that “it described many female emotions of aggression, hostility, resentment” (9). But that was of course one of the ways in which it liberated: as Lessing notes, it put into print much that had never been heard outside private gossip between women. What made it extraordinary was that it was not a book solely about female experience; it was seamed through with the understanding that politics is fundamental, that individuals whether male or female are coursed through by the shared hopes and fears of their lived historical moment—but also that they live that moment differently from each other.