The Golden Notebook

Lessing was born during World War I—her father was a veteran whose leg was amputated; her mother was his nurse—who lived through World War II, as well as the many wars which followed, including the Cold War. The Golden Notebook itself is intimately concerned with war and its aftermath, particularly World War II. Following the author’s lead, this guide refers to World War II as “the war,” a convention that illustrates how all-encompassing “the war” was for those who lived through it. Molly’s house, in Free Women, had been “laid open by a bomb towards the end of the war” (47), and Anna’s newspaper clippings—which she pastes in her notebooks and pins to the walls of her rooms—almost all have to do with war.

This, in part, explains Anna’s (and, concomitantly, Lessing’s) commitment to communism: At the time, embracing communism was a way of opposing the fascism of Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy. Unfortunately, the excesses of Stalin’s Soviet Union eroded the faith that communism might be a corrective to the corrupting powers of history. Anna’s political disillusionment is linked directly to the revelations about Stalin’s unprecedented abuses of power.

The Cold War also features prominently. In 1950s England, where most of the novel is set, Anna and her group become suspect because of their communist sympathies: “Of course all the discussion clubs, groups, etc.