Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook After Fifty

the long version

Doris Lessing's "The Golden Notebook", ground-breaking in both narrative form and subject matter when it was first published in 1962, encompasses important political and social developments of the mid-twentieth century, from the politics of apartheid in southern Africa to the early stirrings of the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s to the Cold War and the dissolution of Communism. The twelve essays collected here, prompted by the novel's golden anniversary, encompass a range of approaches from critical analyses to appreciative essays by scholars who knew Lessing personally. More than a half-century of chronological distance has prompted new and stimulating geopolitical, autobiographical, theoretical, and aesthetic readings by established and emerging scholars across several generations and nationalities, who offer up-to-date insights for twenty-first century readers of this influential novel.