The Golden Notebook

The Grass Is Singing (1950)

Lessing’s first published novel, this is almost certainly the model for Anna Wulf’s Frontiers of War.

Children of Violence (1952-1969)

A series of five semi-autobiographical novels: Martha Quest (1952); A Proper Marriage (1954); A Ripple from the Storm (1958); Landlocked (1965); The Four-Gated City (1969). These books explore some of the same themes about which The Golden Notebook is concerned. They are also even more autobiographical in nature than The Golden Notebook. Ultimately, they stretch beyond realistic fiction into what Lessing termed her “inner space fiction.”

Canopus in Argos: Archives (1979-1983)

This is another sequence of five novels that depict future societies at various points in their development: Shikasta (1979); The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five (1980); The Sirian Experiments (1980); The Making of the Representative for Planet 8 (1982); The Sentimental Agents in the Volyen Empire (1983). These novels are all more overtly “inner space fiction” or science fiction, though they are all resonant with ideas about mental health, the fragmentation of society, and the end of history and empire.