"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 article 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 of the fact that its timeliness is yet to be exhausted, I explore how Lessing’s provocative figurations of time illuminate the ideological and representational structures within which Lessing and her characters find themselves confined, while also gesturing, speculatively, towards the means by which these structures might be subverted in the future.