Although she has a job, she has no aspirations for a career, confident that motherhood is her true calling. When the novel begins, in nineteen-sixties England, she is a young homemaker with the personality of a lace doily: decorous, brittle, self-consciously antiquated. Until Ben, Harriet would never have entertained such questions about a child. Although he seldom cries, he “grunts and snuffles and roars.” He gives his aunt “the creeps.” Harriet, who dotes on her four other children, begins to observe him like a specimen, shuddering at his awful strength and “sallow lumpishness.” Is Ben a changeling, a goblin, a “hostile little troll,” she wonders? Has she given birth to a baby monster or a monstrous baby? As a newborn, he is “muscular, yellowish, long,” with “greeny-yellow eyes” and a “sloped” forehead. Even in the womb, Ben’s movements seem to her less like signs of life than acts of aggression. She draws on her expertise in Lessing’s genre-crossing oeuvre, but also in feminist theory, to discuss whether The Golden Notebook truly is a feminist novel.Harriet, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s 1988 novel, “ The Fifth Child,” has a terrible feeling about her youngest son.

To round things off, we interview Susan Watkins, who is a Professor in the School of Cultural Studies and Humanities at Leeds Beckett University. She is Professor Emerita in Literature at American University, and among her numerous publications on Lessing is a full monograph on form. Then, at the heart of this episode, we hear from Roberta Rubenstein on certain crucial ways that this novel’s form contributes to its literary value. Alice, who has published widely on Lessing, highlights The Golden Notebook‘s enduring social and historical significance. First up is Alice Ridout, Associate Professor in the Department of English and Film at Algoma University. Inspired by Lessing, we have attempted a small formal experiment and shaped this episode around contributions from three expert guests. What holds these varied themes – and the related parts of Anna’s life – together is The Golden Notebook‘s fascinating form. Across the book, she grapples with such diverse themes as colonialism, communism, the life of writing, and what it means to be a “free” woman in the 1940s and 50s. Although Anna lives in the UK, her memories take us to southern Africa and her imagination to the USSR.

Like Lessing, Anna is a writer, but the similarities between author and character don’t end there.

Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is next on our list! This novel explores the life of Anna Wulf.

On Cats by Doris Lessing