Lessing’s near-infamous discomfort with being characterised as a feminist writer stemmed from a combination of motivations, but she was particularly uncomfortable with the reductive logic which seemed to follow from such a characterisation – namely, that that must be all she was. A subtle political and intellectual evolution Perhaps it is for that reason she continued to occupy an uncomfortable place in a genealogy of that period: she was a late modernist, an early postmodernist, a social realist, a Marxist, a Jungian, a Sufi, a science-fictionalist – among many other things. She wrote The Golden Notebook at the end of the 1950s as a post-war immigrant to London, and she has always occupied something of an in-between position – not only culturally and politically, but also in the literary milieu of her contemporaries. She left school in what was then Southern Rhodesia in her early teens and educated herself with the impromptu library of books she cobbled together by order from Britain.
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