The Golden Notebook

In the novel The Golden Notebook, Lesing presents under a fixed title (The story of two women with freedom) through five chapters, the story or experience of Anna and Molly, the leftist friends in the 1950s. Molly is a theater actress and political activist living separated from her husband with her young son Tommy. However, the novel focuses more on Anna Wolf and her inner life, as Anna writes her diaries in four notebooks of different colors, "This way, they kept them separate notebooks so that ideas do not crowd and chaos prevails," as she says. She conveys her life experience, especially her political work in Britain and Africa, where she lived for a period, as well as her relationship or view of the men she has been with. She also records her mood swings, changes in her mental state, and her relationship with her daughter Janet. The notebooks form a novel within a novel, revolving around the life/experience of a free woman, writer, and mother who engages in her society's issues and tries to gather the scattered pieces.