Lessing's radical exploration of communism, female liberation, motherhood and mental breakdown was hailed as the 'feminist bible' and reviled as 'castrating'. Four generations of writers reflect on what it means to them
Lessing (front right) with John Osborne in 1961. Behind them are Sheila Delaney and Vanessa Redgrave. Photograph: Reg Warhurst/Associated Newspapers/Rex
Diana Athill
Of course I read The Golden Notebook as soon as it came out. Everyone did. But I took against it. I and most of my friends, who were more or less the same age as Doris Lessing, felt, as she did, that society was in a shocking mess and that socialism was probably the answer, so most of us flirted with the idea of joining the Communist party. My own reason for not, in the end, doing so was that I knew myself to be too frivolous for the necessary commitment, and there was also a streak of something more respectable in my motive: I felt dubious about ends justifying means, which I took to be an important part of Communist thinking. Those of us who did not choose to join the party (the majority) had no trouble believing the evidence of Stalinist horrors that soon began to leak out of Russia, because that evidence was far more convincing than Communist pieties; so I soon became impatient with a book full of minute analysis of the dismay and distress of party members when they had to face the ugly truth which had been accepted by everyone else for years. Their situation was interesting, but not so tremendously interesting as all that. Lessing's involvement with it made me think of the Holy Roman Emperor's supposed comment on an opera by Mozart: "Too many notes." On this subject Lessing had written "too many words".
Her other important theme, the situation of women, would have appealed to me much more if it had not been for the elaborate structure in which she had chosen to wrap it, her tendency to overstate, and her style. This seemed to me often to become stiff, particularly in the heavy-handed passages of dialogue between Anna and Molly. The switches of mood that occurred so often in these were unconvincing and so obviously engineered to exemplify the points Lessing wanted to make. I loved her earlier writing about her life in Africa, which was relaxed and vivid, and which I recognised again when The Golden Notebook's story took it to Africa, but when it moved to London the style became clumsier. It tended to be assertive, and I agree with Montaigne that assertiveness provokes resistance. Although Lessing writes with feeling about the uncertainties and frailties of her women characters, there is a slightly pompous solemnity – almost didacticism – in the atmosphere that prevails in The Golden Notebook, as though its author were not searching out the truth, but stating that she knows it – always a dangerous thing for anyone to do.
Or so it seemed to me when I first read it. Going back to it, I find it easier to forgive the clumsiness of its structure, and that stiffness – to admire the boldness of its ambition and be moved by its passion. It is certainly impressive, looming so large in the landscape of 20th-century literature. But I cannot say that it was a landmark book for me.
Read what Margaret Drabble, Rachel Cusk, and Natalie Hanman have to say.