One of the most laudatory reviews of The Golden Notebook when it first appeared in 1963 was by this magazine's founding editor, Irving Howe. Writing in the New Republic, Howe praised Lessing's abilities as a novelist: "Precise and nuanced dialogue . . . a novel that never stoops to verbal display and is always directed toward establishing a visible world." He was delighted to discover a made-up universe-in this case, a universe dominated by women-that was such a realistic reflection of a certain part of the Old Left: the communist intelligentsia and their fellow travelers circa 1956, the politically charged year in which the novel is set. Howe, though a vehement anticommunist, was drawn to Anna Wulf (a lightly veiled rendering of Lessing) and her friend Molly as "voices of a baffled generation, those people who gave their youth to radicalism and ended not knowing how to live."

Anna says it best: "There is no group of people or type of intellectual I have met o...

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