Where to start with Doris Lessing
The Grass Is Singing gives Lessing's politics, psychological pressure, and colonial setting a taut shape before The Golden Notebook.
The Golden Notebook's colored sections feel like a puzzle, and you want to know how Lessing builds a mind under social pressure.
Reading The Golden Notebook at normal novel pace, getting confused by the frame novel and the four notebooks and the eventual fifth, and concluding Lessing's structure is a gimmick. Or reading the book through its sixties feminism reception and missing that the politics are inside a wider argument about how a woman writer organises her life when none of the available forms fit.
Books in order
- The Grass Is Singing — Lessing's short first novel about colonial Rhodesia — the textbook gentler ramp into her sentences before the multi-coloured architecture of the Notebook arrives.
- The Golden Notebook — Read the frame novel — Free Women — alongside the four notebooks. Black is the writer notebook. Red is the politics. Yellow is the fictional re-writing of the life. Blue is the diary. Read slowly. The fifth notebook — the gold one — is what the structure was always working toward.
Further reading
- Children of Violence — The five-novel Martha Quest sequence — Lessing's long autobiographical project. Save it; it rewards a reader who already trusts her at length.