Rereading The Golden Notebook After Chick Lit

Abstract

“The Golden Notebook, first published in 1962, has had 50 years of an up-and-down life after a difficult birth,” Doris Lessing informs us in the short piece aptly titled “Guarded Welcome” at the end of the 2008 HarperPerennial Modern Classics edition of The Golden Notebook (“P.S.” 11). Other books and genres have also had “up-and-down” lives over the past fifty years and, since the publication of The Golden Notebook, one of the most culturally influential and financially successful phenomena to erupt onto the literary scene has been “chick lit.” The Golden Notebook was in many ways an enabling text for chick lit. However, Lessing’s discomfort with identifying The Golden Notebook as a woman-centered or feminist text is an important contrast to the tendency in chick lit to celebrate being written by women, for women, about women. To quote her famous 1971 Preface, “this novel was not a trumpet for Women’s Liberation” because its “central theme” was “‘breakdown’” not “the sex war” (The Golden Notebook xiii) and she describes those female readers who “claimed” it “as a useful weapon in the sex war” (xii) as having put her in a “false position” (xiii). To elucidate what is at stake in these two different attitudes to “women’s writing”—chick lit’s embrace and Lessing’s resistance—I will turn at the end of my chapter to Toril Moi’s 2009 article, “‘I Am Not a Woman Writer’: About Women, Literature and Feminist Theory Today.”