On her own terms: Doris Lessing’s Golden Notebook remains shocking, necessary and imperfect – a dazzling experiment in living as a woman

The Golden Notebook is a blueprint, a dazzling experiment, and its flaws are life’s flaws – there to be interrogated and worked though. That is the take-it-or-leave-it dichotomy that Lessing explores. Looking back on the book’s initial reception, in her preface to the 2007 edition, Lessing acknowledged: ‘Apparently what many women were thinking, feeling, experiencing came as a great surprise.’ However, she repeatedly distanced herself from any claim on the novel as a foundational feminist text; as she told The Guardian in 2007: ‘I’m not interested in being a feminist icon. If you are a woman and you think at all, you are going to have to write about it, otherwise you aren’t writing about the time you are living in.’