Doris Lessing's 'The Golden Notebook'

Literature is the reflection of human action. Since the last two centuries, the woman writer and women’s writings have gone through some significant changes. Doris Lessing has a creative energy like her male contemporaries, in the nineteenth century she was confined to the marginal of a patriarchal society by which she was only appreciated on account of her marital and domestic duty—for she was not entitled to many rights. Maybe she wrote a manuscript under a male pseudonym to be accepted; maybe she burnt or buried her manuscript, afraid of the consequences it might have. She perfectly inscribed a counter narrative by which she did manage to articulate some of her objectives. Doris Lessing is the prominent women writers in the 20th century. In 1962, her

Unlike her brother William who had every opportunity to develop his interests and eventually shows up his ambitions. “Judith”, as Virginia Woolf named her, ambitions seemingly would have been narrowed down from the moment she was born. If she had any ambition that would not include a domestic career, it would not have been accepted. Many stories by and about women will never be known, discussed in class, or taken up in history books. The history of “female literature” would have had a much wider scope today, if it was not for woman’s supposedly inferior position that did not allow her to develop any artistic qualities.

Women’s writing in The Golden Notebook is the fact that writing by and about women is assessed from a completely different point of view compared to writing by men. It almost seems that female authors of today are still located in a marginal position—or at least very easily overlooked. Women’s writing has always been inscribed in definitions made by men. Subsequently, when a woman writer could not be included in the dominant tradition, her work was described as inferior, inadequate or negatively connoted as “feminist