The Golden Notebook

One of the most important books of the growing feminist movement of the 1950s, The Golden Notebook was brought to a wider public when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in 2007. In the book, author Anna Wulf attempts to overcome writer’s block by writing a comprehensive “golden notebook” that draws together the preoccupations of her life, each of which is examined in a different notebook: sources of her creative inspiration in a black book, communism in a red book, the breakdown of her marriage in a yellow book, and day-to-day emotions and dreams in a blue book. Anna’s struggle to unify the various strands of her life—emotional, political, and professional—amasses into a fascinating encyclopedia of female experience in the ’50s. In this authentic, taboo-breaking novel, Lessing brings the plight of women’s lives from obscurity behind closed doors into broad daylight. The Golden Notebook resonates with the concerns and experiences of a great many women and is a true modern classic, thoroughly deserving of its reputation as a feminist bible. A notoriously long and complex work, it is given a new life by this first unabridged recording.