What's the Time, Anna Wulf? Crisis, Temporality and Feminist Untimeliness in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook

When Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook was first published in 1962, it was instantly lauded as a timely novel. In this essay, I investigate what is timely about The Golden Notebook through an analysis of the novel's complex temporality. Taking the book's phenomenal critical legacy as a signal indication that its timeliness is yet to be exhausted, I explore how Lessing's provocative figurations of time illuminate the ideological and representational structures that confine Lessing and her characters. In doing so, I also gesture, speculatively, toward how these structures might be subverted in the future.