The Golden Notebook

Ellen W. Brooks (Essay Date 1973)

SOURCE: Brooks, Ellen W. "The Image of Woman in Lessing's The Golden Notebook." Critique 15, no. 1 (1973): 101-09.

In the following essay, Brooks studies Anna, the protagonist of The Golden Notebook, as she struggles to transcend her divided self and archetypal female roles in order to emerge as a more aware, liberated woman.

Doris Lessing is one of the most wide-ranging and comprehensive of contemporary novelists. Her strong, straightforward prose has embraced a number of modern social, political, and psychological questions. However, the immense appeal of Lessing's fiction rests largely on her treatment of woman in modern life, the most thorough and accurate of any in literature. Her achievement is all the more significant in that so few writers have presented women with whom one can identify—complex, intelligent, questioning women who are not content with the...