The Story Archive

The Golden Notebook

Doris Lessing · 1962 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

Anna Wulf, a writer who cannot begin a second book, keeps her life in four coloured notebooks — Africa and the failed first one, the Communist Party, a fiction about a woman very like herself, and the daily record — with a flat conventional narrative called Free Women running between them. The compartments exist to hold a breakdown off. Lessing's most influential work, read against her own objections as a founding text of second-wave feminism.

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Attributes

Genre
PsychologicalPolitical
Theme
Identity & SelfArt & CreationMadnessIndividual vs Society
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
CreatorRebel / OutlawThe Double
Plot structure
Nonlinear / FracturedMetafictionFrame Narrative
Symbol / motif
The Book / ManuscriptThe MirrorThe City
Conflict
vs Selfvs Society
Mode / tone
ModernistMetafictionalRealist
Culture / tradition
English

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