British writer Doris Lessing felt that “a writer’s job is to provoke questions.” Her first published book, The Grass Is Singing, is about a white farmer and his wife and their African servant in Rhodesia. Among her most substantial works is the series Children of Violence, a five-novel sequence that centres on Martha Quest, who grows up in southern Africa and settles in England. The Golden Notebook, in which a woman writer attempts to come to terms with the life of her times through her art, is one of the most complex and the most widely read of her novels. Although she shied away from being described as a feminist, Lessing was embraced by many feminists because she broke new ground in exploring the lives of women. In the novel, Anna Freeman Wulf has written a commercially successful novel based on her experiences as a young woman during World War II in South Central Africa, in a country called Southern Rhodesia. Now living in London on the royalties from this novel, Anna cares for her thirteen-year-old daughter, Janet. Meanwhile, Anna writes continually in her notebooks to explore the larger meaning of her life and of her writing… Lessing, in her preface, claimed the most important theme in the novel is fragmentation; the mental breakdown that Anna suffers, perhaps from the compartmentalization of her life reflected in the division of the four notebooks, but also reflecting the fragmentation of society. You can listen online to free English audiobook “The Golden Notebook” by Doris Lessing on our website. Enjoy it!
