In “A Doll’s House,” the 1879 play by Henrik Ibsen about a woman’s passionate quest for independence, the critical, life-altering moment came when she closed a door.
For many women in the late 20th Century, that moment came when they opened a book.
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The book was “The Golden Notebook” (1962). On Thursday its author, Doris Lessing, won the Nobel Prize in literature, becoming the 11th woman to attain the richest literary prize in the world — in terms of both cash (approximately $1.5 million) and prestige.
Lessing, 87, the oldest Nobel literary laureate, lives in London and writes about the tumultuous and the topical: racism, colonialism, terrorism. Her selection seems to continue a recent Nobel tradition of dipping into the roiling waters of politics to fish out winners, including 2006 honoree Orhan Pamuk, an outspoken critic of his native Turkey’s refusal to acknowledge past atrocities, and Harold Pinter, a ferocious opponent of American foreign policy, who won in 2005.
But in a larger sense — and despite the carping of critics such as Harold Bloom, who branded this year’s pick “pure political correctness” — Lessing’s selection is viewed by many as more broadly cultural than narrowly political. As the Nobel Committee said in its citation, she is “an epicist of the female experience” whose novel “The Golden Notebook” is one that “belongs to the handful of books that informed the 20th Century view of the male-female relationship.”
The novel, which follows the line of Lessing’s own life, purports to be a collection of journals kept by Anna Wulf. One chronicles her life in West Africa, while the others follow her time in bohemian London, her erotic relationships and, finally, a synthesis of all the others: the golden notebook.
The novel swiftly became a staple on the syllabi of women’s studies courses at American colleges throughout the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, informing and inspiring a generation of women who later would attain positions of power and responsibility.
That generation includes women such as Sen. Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination; Rep. Nancy Pelosi, first female speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives; judges and generals and CEOs.
‘Scales fell from my eyes’
“Many, many women I know were changed by that book,” said Susan Faludi, author of “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women” (1991) and “The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America” (2007), who read “The Golden Notebook” as a Harvard undergraduate. “It’s one of those ‘the-scales-fell-from-my-eyes’ kind of books.”
Marlene Longenecker, an English professor at Ohio State University who has taught “The Golden Notebook” many times, said, “In the early years of women’s studies, it was very difficult to find any fiction that was authentically a female voice. There were women, but not women who focused on anything but motherhood and marriage. People loved ‘The Golden Notebook’ because it explored aspects of being a woman that no on else was exploring.”
Sandra Gilbert, co-editor of “The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women,” took special delight in the Nobel citation’s use of the word “epicist”: “That women experience epic struggles in their lives and thoughts is indisputably true,” she said, “but wouldn’t have seemed possible in the not-so-distant past.”
Men, too, find much to admire in Lessing’s work. “It’s a terrific choice,” declared Randall Albers, chairman of the fiction writing department at Columbia College Chicago. “Her body of work is extensive, varied, experimental, profound. In a long and remarkable career, her highly crafted, stylistically adventurous and sensitively rendered prose has set a standard for writers all over the world.”
An eventful life
Adventurous, indeed: Along with novels that run the gamut from realism to science fiction to political allegory, Lessing has written autobiographies, plays, essays and an opera libretto. She has lived an inordinately eventful life, born in what was then called Persia but now is Iran, to British expatriate parents. In 1925 the family moved to Southern Rhodesia — now Zimbabwe — where her father tried to farm corn. Doris Lessing, always rebellious, was sent to a British boarding school, but dropped out at 13 and never attended school thereafter, opting instead to educate herself by a frenzy of reading.
Her first novel, “The Grass Is Singing” (1950), is about the bond between a white woman and her black servant, played out in the shadow of the oppression of the indigenous African population. Lessing’s political sensibilities were clear; her anti-apartheid views later would cause her to be censured by the white governments of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. She also joined the Communist Party, later renouncing it.
Informed of her win Thursday when she returned from a shopping trip, Lessing met with reporters on the steps of her London home. She told them she’d celebrated with a gin and tonic: “I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one,” she declared, according to news services. “I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot. … It’s a royal flush.”
Catharine Stimpson, dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University, said of Lessing’s selection, “It’s about time. She has been an overwhelmingly likely candidate for many years. Most of the major issues of the 20th and 21st Centuries she addresses with insight and moral courage.”
While critics such as Bloom interpret Lessing’s work as political manifesto, the author herself doesn’t see it that way. “Nobody is going to believe this, but when I wrote ‘The Golden Notebook,’ I had no idea I was writing a feminist book,” she said in a recent interview. “Because I had been putting into it the sort of thing women had been saying in their kitchen. But something said doesn’t have the effect of something written. People behaved as if I had done something amazing, yet I just wrote down what women were saying.”
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