In fact, this novel was written ‘before its time’ in that it anticipated cultural trends (such as feminism and attitudes towards madness) which were not generally accepted until some years later. One of Mrs Lessing’s aims in The Golden Notebook is to give readers an idea of the intellectual and moral climate of Britain in the mid twentieth century, and she does this by using themes which seem to her to convey that climate. Indeed, division and fragmentation and how they are overcome is a major theme of this novel, and one which later feeds back into the two final volumes of Children of Violence. Through her new protagonist, Anna Wulf, Doris Lessing explores and extends aspects of Martha Hesse in particular, the two characters share similar feelings of alienation and division within themselves. Its publication came in the middle of the Children of Violence sequence, after A Ripple from the Storm and before Landlocked. The Golden Notebook was published in 1962, and is perhaps the best known of all Mrs Lessing’s novels.
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