Anna Wulf is a writer who keeps four notebooks, each a different color, each reflecting a different part of her. The black one contains recollections of her youthful wartime years in West Africa, experiences that went into her first novel. In the red one she reflects on her later life in London's leftist and intellectual circles. The blue notebook analyzes her fraught relations with men. The yellow contains her fragmentary attempts at new fiction. With the fifth, the golden notebook, and with The Golden Notebook, Wulf/Lessing struggles to tie all the threads fearlessly back together again. All the currents of her time flow through Anna—Marx and Freud and the burgeoning dissatisfactions among women that would eventually explode into feminism. Lessing's earnestness can be too much at times, but as a portrait of a woman coming to grips with the realities of her time her book is indispensable.—R.L.