ABSTRACT
Miss Lessing is struggling towards complete honesty through a thicket of stock reactions and counter-reactions, political, emotional and artistic. Only by removing herself by more than the conventional step away from her source material has she any hope of seeing it clearly. Moreover, The Golden Notebook itself, when taken with Lessing’s own response to its reception, suggests a more convoluted process. The novel itself is part of a wider sense of split between creation and criticism. With the expansion of the media and higher education, the position of the independent writer was eroded. ‘Realism is an issue not only for literature: it is major political issue and must be treated as such,’ Brecht wrote in the 1930s. The debates around realism, disputed throughout literary theory, have never been so embroiled as in Marxist circles, where they are closely linked to questions of the position of the writer in relation to party and class formations, of political commitment and viable intervention.
