The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
MARTHA QUEST
Intelligent, sensitive, and fiercely passionate, Martha Quest is a young woman living on a farm in Africa, feeling her way through the torments of adolescence and early womanhood. She is a romantic idealistic in revolt against the puritan snobbery of her parents, trying to live to the fullest with every nerve, emotion, and instinct laid bare to experience. For her, this is a time of solitary reading, daydreams, dancing—and the first disturbing encounters with sex. Martha Quest is the first novel in Doris Lessing’s classic Children of Violence series, each a masterpiece in its own right and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of the world in the twentieth century.
A PROPER MARRIAGE
An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security.
A Proper Marriage is the second novel in the Children of Violence series.
A RIPPLE FROM THE STORM
Martha Quest, the heroine of the Children of Violence series, has been acclaimed as one of the greatest fictional creations in the English language. In A Ripple from the Storm, Doris Lessing charts Martha Quest’s personal and political adventures in race-torn British Africa, following Martha through World War II, a grotesque second marriage, and an excursion into Communism. This wise and starling novel perceptively reveals the paradoxes, passions, and ironies rooted in the life of twentieth-century Anglo-Africa.
A Ripple from the Storm is the third novel in the Children of Violence series.
LANDLOCKED
In the aftermath of World War II, Martha Quest finds herself completely disillusioned. She is losing faith in the Communist movement in Africa, and her marriage to one of the movement’s leaders is disintegrating. Determined to resist the erosion of her personality, she engages in her first satisfactory love affair and breaks free, if only momentarily, from her suffocating unhappiness.
Landlocked is the fourth novel in the Children of Violence series.
THE FOUR-GATED CITY
Now middle-aged, Martha Quest moves to London, where she lives through many of the great social and political movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In Lessing’s chilling rendition, though, that century ends with the nuclear decimation of World War III.
The Four-Gated City is the fifth and final novel in the Children of Violence series.
Don’t miss the next book by your favorite author. Sign up now for AuthorTracker by visiting www.AuthorTracker.com.
OTHER BOOKS BY DORIS LESSING
NOVELS
The Grass Is Singing
Briefing for a Descent into Hell
The Summer Before the Dark
The Memoirs of a Survivor
The Diaries of Jane Somers:
The Diary of a Good Neighbor
If the Old Could…
The Good Terrorist
The Fifth Child
Love, Again
Mara and Dann
Ben, in the World
The Sweetest Dream
The Story of General Dann and Mara’s
Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog
The Cleft
“CANOPUS IN ARGOS: ARCHIVES”
SERIES
Re: Colonized Planet 5, Shikasta
The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four and Five
The Sirian Experiments
The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8
Documents Relating to the Sentimental
Agents in the Volyen Empire
“CHILDREN OF VIOLENCE” SERIES
Martha Quest
A Proper Marriage
A Ripple from the Storm
Landlocked
The Four-Gated City
SHORT STORIES
African Stories:
Volume I: This Was the Old Chief’s
Country
Volume II: The Sun Between Their
Feet
Stories:
Volume I: To Room Nineteen
Volume II: The Temptation of Jack
Orkney and Other Stories
The Real Thing: Stories and Sketches
(U.S.), London Observed (U.K.)
The Grandmothers
OPERA
The Making of the Representative for
Planet 8 (music by Philip Glass)
The Marriages Between Zones Three,
Four and Five (music by Philip Glass)
POETRY
Fourteen Poems
NONFICTION
In Pursuit of the English
Particularly Cats
Going Home
A Small Personal Voice
Prisons We Choose to Live Inside
The Wind Blows Away Our Words
Particularly Cats…and Rufus
African Laughter
Time Bites
Alfred and Emily
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Under My Skin
Walking in the Shade
The Doris Lessing Reader
Credits
Cover design by Robin Bilardello
Cover photograph © Charles Hewitt/Stringer/Getty Images
Copyright
This book was originally published in 1962 by Simon & Schuster. Paperback editions were published in 1973 by Bantam and in 1981 by Bantam Windstone. This edition is printed by arrangement with Bantam Books.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK. Copyright © 1962 by Doris Lessing. Copyright renewed © 1990 by Doris Lessing. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL EDITION PUBLISHED 1994.
FIRST PERENNIAL CLASSICS EDITION PUBLISHED 1999.
FIRST HARPER PERENNIAL MODERN CLASSICS EDITION PUBLISHED 2008.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Perennial Classics edition as follows:
Lessing, Doris May, 1919–
The golden notebook : a novel / Doris Lessing.—1st Perennial Classics ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-06-093140-X
1. Women novelists, English—Diaries—Fiction. 2. Friendship—England—London—Fiction. 3. Women—England—London—Fiction. 4. London (England)—Fiction. I. Title
PR6023.E833G6 1999
823’.914—dc21
98–47608
ISBN 978-0-06-158248-6 (Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition)
08 09 10 11 12 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
EPub Edition © JUNE 2013 ISBN: 9780062295002
About the Publisher
Australia
HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.
Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street
Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia
http://www.harpercollins.com.au
Canada
HarperCollins Canada
2 Bloor Street East – 20th Floor
Toronto, ON, M4W, 1A8, Canada
http://www.harpercollins.ca
New Zealand
HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited
P.O. Box 1
Auckland, New Zealand
http://www.harpercollins.co.nz
United Kingdom
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
77-85 Fulham Palace Road
London, W6 8JB, UK
http://www.harpercol
United States
HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
10 East 53rd Street
New York, NY 10022
http://www.harpercollins.com
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook