The Golden Notebook

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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.

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  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

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