Introduction

Abstract

Like many of her readers, Doris Lessing has repeatedly reread her most famous novel, The Golden Notebook (1962). She has always been alert to the ways in which the context of the reader can generate diverse interpretations of a text, akin to her protagonist, Anna Wulf, who offers contradictory reviews of her previously published novel, Frontiers of War, in 1951 and then “from 1954 on” (58). In her most famous rereading of The Golden Notebook, her 1971 Preface, Lessing expressed her irritation at the impact of readers’ contexts on the readings they produce:

Some books are not read in the right way because they have skipped a stage of opinion, assume a crystallisation of information in society which has not yet taken place. This book was written as if the attitudes that have been created by the Women’s Liberation movement already existed. It came out first ten years ago, in 1962. If it were coming out now for the first time it might be read, and not merely reacted to: things have changed very fast. (xiv)