Doris Lessing's the Golden Notebook After Fifty

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.

Alice Ridout is Assistant Professor of English at Algoma University, Canada. She is President of the Doris Lessing Society, the author of Contemporary Women Writers Look Back: From Irony to Nostalgia (2010), and co-editor of Doris Lessing: Border Crossings (2009).

Roberta Rubenstein is Professor of Literature at American University. She is the author of five books, including her pioneering book, The Novelistic Vision of Doris Lessing: Breaking the Forms of Consciousness (1979); Virginia Woolf and the Russian Point of View (2009); and, most recently, Literary Half-Lives: Doris Lessing, Clancy Sigal, and Roman a Clef (2014).

Sandra Singer is Associate Professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph, Canada. She was co-editor of Doris Lessing Studies from 2004-2014 and co-edited Doris Lessing: Interrogating the Times (2010).