What the novel’s later preface suggests is that Lessing found the critical and popular emphasis on this issue to the exclusion of all others profoundly irritating. To generalise, it is less the case that she disavowed her earlier politics than that she saw so many ideologies of emancipation turned into dogmas.Įarly readers of The Golden Notebook were by no means wrong in recognising Lessing’s prescient and provocative diagnosis of what she referred to (albeit wryly) as “the sex war”. What is lost in this view of Lessing as an ideological turncoat, however, is an understanding of the subtle character of her political and intellectual evolution. Her occasionally blunt articulation of this discomfort, along with her move away from the psychological and social realism of The Golden Notebook, led to her being seen in some quarters as a former fellow-traveller who had strayed from the path. Lessing’s near-infamous discomfort with being characterised as a feminist writer stemmed from a combination of motivations, but she was particularly uncomfortable with the reductive logic which seemed to follow from such a characterisation – namely, that that must be all she was. A subtle political and intellectual evolution Perhaps it is for that reason she continued to occupy an uncomfortable place in a genealogy of that period: she was a late modernist, an early postmodernist, a social realist, a Marxist, a Jungian, a Sufi, a science-fictionalist – among many other things.

She wrote The Golden Notebook at the end of the 1950s as a post-war immigrant to London, and she has always occupied something of an in-between position – not only culturally and politically, but also in the literary milieu of her contemporaries. She left school in what was then Southern Rhodesia in her early teens and educated herself with the impromptu library of books she cobbled together by order from Britain.

Doris lessing the golden