The ‘Terror of This City’: Re-mapping The Golden Notebook

Abstract

Throughout her literary career, Lessing’s engagement with urban space, and the city of London in particular, is intense and far-reaching. However, in the case of the novel that is generally regarded as her masterpiece, The Golden Notebook, the image of the city has often been overshadowed in critical interest by such issues as the gender and class critique, or the daring experimentalism of its narrative technique. For several decades, it has thus escaped the critics’ attention that this complex novel also provides an extremely rich analysis of London life in the 1950s.