This is a 1962 work by Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing. The Golden Notebook follows the life of one writer Anna Wulf and the four notebooks she populates with musings on life, with each colour coded notebook representing different interests.

Lessing’s work is considered one of the best novels of the 20th century. With themes of fragmentation, feminism, colonialism, mental illness, and communism (LEFTIES!!!!), this is an impressive way and ahead of its time. Covering over 500 pages, it’s a commitment to read but one that remains ever-relevant to modern life.

Fragmentation Abounds in the World of The Golden Notebook

“Very few people really care about freedom, about liberty, about the truth, very few. Very few people have guts, the kind of guts on which a real democracy has to depend. Without people with that sort of guts a free society dies or cannot be born.”

This work is essentially four separate books. The narrator, Anna, breaks her thoughts and feelings into different diaries:

• Black: Documenting her experiences in Southern Rhodesia during WWII.
• Red: Thoughts and feelings on politics and life in the Communist Party.
• Yellow: Musings on a novel she’s writing.
• Blue: Considerations on everyday life.

The fifth notebook is the golden one, in which she’s attempting to tie the other four works together to make more sense of her life.

In fact, it seems she’s keeping that one in an attempt to overcome her personal demons. By finishing it, she hopes to “cure” herself and find peace of mind.

It was common for people to keep a diary back when technology wasn’t so advanced. These days, social media sites and blogging platforms like this here WordPress have become a new-fangled way to rant at the world. But notebook/diary keeping is still a healthy habit to pursue.

Anna Wulf is a successful write with one big hit novel, but the rest of her life seems scattered. She’s divorced and a single mother now struggling with writer’s block.

The setting is 1950s London and her post-WWII considerations include fears about losing her mind. In some respects, this work is a like a more advanced take on Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which launched a year after Lessing’s work.

But if you think this is going to be a droning affair of someone a bit self-absorbed, Wulf is actually a revolutionary. A commie (!!!!!!!!), she’s picked apart society in that particular way some people just don’t like acknowledging.

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

Lessing (1919-2013) uses all her considerable skill, and obvious high intelligence, to craft a pretty enthralling read here. It won’t be for everyone (particularly if you don’t like RADICAL LEFTISTS!), but for our money The Golden Notebook was way ahead of its time and, at its best, enthralling stuff.

But it is a work that takes time to enjoy. A slow read, slow burner, with no considerable explosive moments—Wulf is simply on a personal journey of her place in the world and how society debases itself with rigid structures.

You’ll also note her declamations are also, rather frighteningly, easy to apply to modern life here in 2025.

“We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known. They have known for thousands of years that to lock a sick person into solitary confinement makes him worse. They have known for thousands of years that a poor man who is frightened of his landlord and of the police is a slave. They have known it. We know it. But do the great enlightened mass of the British people know it? No. It is our task, Ella, yours and mine, to tell them. Because the great men are too great to be bothered. They are already discovering how to colonise Venus and to irrigate the moon. That is what is important for our time. You and I are the boulder-pushers. All our lives, you and I, we’ll put all our energies, all our talents into pushing a great boulder up a mountain. The boulder is the truth that the great men know by instinct, and the mountain is the stupidity of mankind.”

That appears to be a nod to Greek mythology in Sisyphus there, the individual condemned to repeatedly roll a big boulder up a hill each day. As in, easily applicable to the bizarre lives most of us live—get up, go to work, go home, rinse and repeat until dead.

In her 1971 preface to the work, Lessing noted she now viewed Marxist ideology as a failure.

Not that it dampens the effectiveness of this book. As a work of polemical, feminist literature we’d say this is up there with the likes of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). One that feels more prevalent than ever as fascism appears to be rearing its head once more in the modern, “free” world.

Very impressive, then, and a work we’re sure will appeal to a certain sect of our reader base (you know who you are).

Notes on Doris Lessing’s Later Career

Above is Lessing in 1985 discussing her latest work (The Food Terrorist).

The Golden Notebook is semi-autobiographical, as she was a member of the Communist Party and an opponent of apartheid, which led to her ban from South Africa in 1957.

She moved to London, took up her Communist roots again, but then left the British Commie Bastard Party in 1957. After this she became interested in spirituality and the Sufi tradition (Sufism is a mystical Islamic practice about gaining unification with your deity of choice and/or Allah).

What’s very impressive about Lessing was her fearlessness as a writer.

She was eager to cover intensely polarising topics such as racial relations, feminism, apartheid, communism, and the putative failures of capitalism. All wrapped up in a thoughtful look at mental health and illness, which we get the impression just wasn’t discussed much when The Golden Notebook launched in 1962.

We weren’t around at the time, but can’t imagine the Swinging Sixties being a hotbed of discussion about burnout, bad days, social anxiety, or all these other things that get you labelled a “snowflake” these days.

Anyway, we always think it’s a good idea to head into these matters with an open mind.

Especially now, when the average discourse across social media is to be as immediately verbally abusive to other people’s opinions as possible. Instead, you can look at Lessing’s works and how they’re meditative in nature—written to make you think, consider, and evolve as a person.

And that, dear reader, is the power of books. Don’t burn them! Read them.