The “true” Anna, Tommy, Molly, Richard, and Marion can never be grasped directly, only inferred by interpreting the notebooks. Astonishingly, the golden notebook reveals that Free Women is not an objective frame story about the “real” Anna Wulf, who reveals her subjective feelings and history in the notebooks rather, Free Women is the real Anna Wulf’s fictionalization of her life, an heir to the yellow notebook. “The two women were alone in the London flat” is the first sentence of Free Women. And although I grew up in a different world than Anna and Lessing and Ella, I often saw myself in her and recognized her struggles.Now, the solution to Anna’s romantic block forces her to address her creative block just as their merged identity has helped them confront their madness by leading them deeper into it, Anna and Saul’s merger allows them both to write again, as they trade the first lines of what become their next works. It is about feminism and politics and sexuality and control. There is a lot to absorb in The Golden Notebook. She wrote a successful novel and writes almost daily but has no interest in publishing again or allowing her novel to be adapted to film or TV. She challenges the role of women in society but allows herself to be controlled by others. She is confident and sexually liberated, but she struggles with her relationship with men, often entering into destructive relationships with men who mistreat her. The idealism that led her to Communism is challenged by the corruption of the Stalin regime and her commitment to the party wanes. She struggles with her political beliefs.

She realizes she has contradictions in her life and she separates them, unsuccessfully trying to minimize her anxiety. But it is fragmented because Anna is fragmented. The book jumps around in time and in perspective, making it fragmented and sometimes difficult to follow. 'A black notebook, which is to do with Anna Wolf the writer Ī yellow notebook, in which I make stories out of my experience Īnd a blue notebook which tries to be a diary.' But she recognizes the different aspects of herself and decides to capture each aspect in a separate notebook, organized (in her own words) as follows: Anna hopes to better understand herself by writing down all her thoughts. The journals are organized by topic, rather by time.

Notebook tells Anna's story in a non-linear fashion, switching between a third person narrative of the life of Anna and her social circles and the contents of her four journals. In Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, protagonist Anna Wulf serves as a surrogate for Lessing, expressing the philosophies and doubts of the author And the fictional Wulf is a writer who injects herself into the Ella - the protagonist of her own novel.

The golden notebook