Anna’s relationships with the German exile Willi Rodde and the young British airmen Paul Blackenhurst, Jimmy McGrath, and Ted Brown during the 1940s are suffused with the sense of fear and displacement, both social and geographical, that characterized a generation of Europeans forced not only to fight in World War II but also to confront the similarities between their nations’ treatment of colonized peoples and the Nazis’ campaign of genocide and territorial expansion. Set primarily in the 1950s (but with some flashbacks to the 1940s), The Golden Notebook echoes shifts in the global order as World War II gave way to the Cold War, and the colonized world began to pursue independence from Europe. In 2007, Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power” at the age of 88, although she was reportedly first considered for the Prize in the 1980s and responded to the news of her award by insisting that she “couldn’t care less.” In the 1970s and 1980s Lessing began exploring science fiction and Sufi mystical themes, and in the following decades she expanded into other genres, writing opera libretti for composer Philip Glass and a two-volume autobiography. Lessing’s work took a psychological turn in the 1960s in 1962, she published The Golden Notebook, which remains her most celebrated work. In the next decade, she continued to write fiction based on her upbringing in Africa and participate in left-wing politics although she gave up communism in 1954, South Africa and her homeland of Southern Rhodesia both banned her from returning in 1956. (In The Golden Notebook, protagonist Anna Wulf fictionalizes this portion of Lessing’s life in her black notebook.) In 1949, Doris Lessing divorced Gottfried Lessing and brought their young son to London soon thereafter, she published her first novel, The Grass is Singing. Dissatisfied, she soon left her new family to spend her free time in discussion with the Left Book Club, where she met her next husband, the German communist exile Gottfried Lessing. After pursuing unfruitful relationships out of her self-described “fever of erotic longing,” Lessing married at 19 and had two children. During this time, she published a few stories in colonial magazines, and wrote and destroyed two novel manuscripts. Lessing escaped her miserable home to become a nursemaid and telephone operator. She went to a girls’ school in the capital of Salisbury (now Harare) until dropping out at age 13-she never returned to school, but she pursued her education independently, reading extensively during her teen years. Born in what is now Iran to a British imperial clerk and the nurse who cared for him after he lost a leg in World War I, Doris Lessing grew up on a farm in the colony of Southern Rhodesia, which is now Zimbabwe.
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