The red notebook begins with Anna’s invitation to the British Communist Party, of which Molly was already an active, if critical, member. The illicit relationship between a white roadsman, George Hounslow, and the African hotel cook’s wife, Marie, formed the basis for her novel, but she replaced George with a version of the charming, arrogant, Oxford-educated pilot Paul Blackenhurst, with whom she eventually elopes on their last day at the hotel, the day before he dies in an accident on the airstrip. Deciding to stay in colonized Central Africa during World War II, Anna falls into an eclectic group of white socialists, passing her weekends drinking with them at the Mashopi Hotel and ending up in a long, sexless relationship with the German exile Willi Rodde. The narrative cuts to Anna’s four notebooks, into which she has “divided herself.” The black notebook begins with a synopsis of her successful first novel, Frontiers of War, which she still considers inadequate and naïve, before delving into the experiences that provided the novel’s raw material. Anna tells Molly about her waning interest in writing another novel, Richard’s attempts to have an affair with her, the state of their communist friends, and her inability to get over her married ex-lover, Michael. Overhearing all of this, Tommy comes downstairs to refuse his father’s offer. He also wants advice about his current wife, Marion, who has become an alcoholic due to his numerous affairs.

Molly’s ex-husband Richard, a wealthy businessman who now violently disdains the leftist politics that brought them together, visits to talk about finding a job for their son Tommy, who has spent the last few months brooding in his room. The novel alternates between a linear narrative entitled Free Women, which follows the lives of Anna and her friend Molly, and Anna’s four private notebooks: in the black notebook she recalls the time she spent in Africa, the novel she fashioned out of her experience, and her difficulties coping with the novel’s reception in the red notebook she recounts her ambivalent membership in and disavowal of the British Communist Party in the yellow notebook, she starts a novel that closely mirrors her own pattern of unfulfilling relationships in London and the blue notebook serves as her inconsistent personal diary, full of self-doubt and contradiction.įree Women begins, “The two women were alone in the London flat.” Anna, a talented but sheepish writer, tells Molly, the boisterous and “worldly-wise” actress that “everything’s cracking up” in the world. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook is a multilayered novel that centrally concerns the life, memories, and writings of Anna Wulf in the 1950s, during her late twenties and early thirties in London and colonial Africa.

The golden notebook book review