He also wants advice about his current wife, Marion, who has become an alcoholic due to his numerous affairs. Molly’s ex-husband Richard, a wealthy businessman who now violently disdains the leftist politics that brought them together, visits to talk about finding a job for their son Tommy, who has spent the last few months brooding in his room. The novel alternates between a linear narrative entitled Free Women, which follows the lives of Anna and her friend Molly, and Anna’s four private notebooks: in the black notebook she recalls the time she spent in Africa, the novel she fashioned out of her experience, and her difficulties coping with the novel’s reception in the red notebook she recounts her ambivalent membership in and disavowal of the British Communist Party in the yellow notebook, she starts a novel that closely mirrors her own pattern of unfulfilling relationships in London and the blue notebook serves as her inconsistent personal diary, full of self-doubt and contradiction.įree Women begins, “The two women were alone in the London flat.” Anna, a talented but sheepish writer, tells Molly, the boisterous and “worldly-wise” actress that “everything’s cracking up” in the world. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is a multilayered novel that centrally concerns the life, memories, and writings of Anna Wulf in the 1950s, during her late twenties and early thirties in London and colonial Africa.

Author of the golden notebook