The Historicity of Self

1
The Historicity of Self-Constitution in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook – A
Hegelian Critical Reading
David Proud
In The Golden Notebook Lessing set out ‘to give the ideological “feel” of our mid-century’,1
as “Marxism”, and its various offshoots, has fermented ideas everywhere’.2 And yet the
discrediting of the political system that had informed the moral and political certainties of the
novel’s protagonist, Ann Wulf, has left her disillusioned and disorientated, which is mirrored
in the book’s structure. A short novel called Free Women, featuring Anna as the central
character, divides into five sections that frame four notebooks appearing in consecutive
stages, black, red, yellow and blue. As Lessing explains: ‘[Anna] keeps four, and not one
because, as she recognizes, she has to separate things off from each other, out of fear of
chaos, of formlessness – of breakdown’.3
According to Thorpe, ‘Lessing aspired to meet the need for a more varied view of the
human condition… [Anna]… must make her life as she goes along, or be torn and
fragmented by it’.4 But fragmentation implicates a prior unity of that which is fragmented,
thereby raising the question, how did Ann arrive at this condition? In this essay, I shall argue
that Anna characterizes Hegel’s unhappy consciousness. Marx, an avowed ‘pupil of that
mighty thinker’,5 Hegel,6 was particularly inspired by the latter’s historical development of
self-identity, and whose philosophical outlook, as Wood has said:
1 Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook, p. XVII.
2 Ibid., p. XVII.
3 Ibid., p. XIII.
4 Michael Thorpe, Writers and their Work: Doris Lessing (London: Longman Group Ltd., 1973), p. 26.
5 Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, translated by Ben Fowkes (New York: Random House, 1977), C1: 27/97,
(quoted in Wood 1993: p. 414).
6 In 1915, Lenin wrote: ‘… it is impossible to understand Marx’s Capital … without having thoroughly studied
and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood
Marx!!’ (Lenin 1961: p. 180).

2
…treats the world as a complex of processes rather than things, reveals everything to be shot through with
tensions and contradictions demanding resolution and hence to be transitory, and involved in an inevitably
progressive process of development.7
I shall argue that, at some fundamental level, there is a narrative of human experience
underlying the manifest heterogeneity or variety of human existence recorded in The Golden
Notebook, the development of which accounts for Anna’s unhappy consciousness, and which
is intelligible in terms of Hegel’s account of experience as a process.8
Anna acknowledges to herself that each of her notebooks fails to record experience
faithfully. The yellow notebook, a manuscript of a novel, tells of an affair between Ella and
Paul, but Anna concedes that: ‘As soon as one has lived through something, it falls into a
pattern. And the pattern of an affair… is seen in terms of what ends it. That is why all this is
untrue. Because while living through something one doesn’t think like that at all’.9 That is:
‘Literature is analysis after the event’.10 And the blue notebook, Anna’s personal journal
wherein she records her memories, dreams, and emotional life, she ‘had expected to be the
most truthful of the notebooks’, and yet it:
… is worse than any of them. I expected a terse record of facts to present some sort of a pattern when I read
it over, but this sort of record is [just] false… because of its assumption that if I wrote ‘at nine-thirty I went
to the lavatory to shit and at two to pee and at four I sweated’, this would be more real than if I simply wrote
what I thought.11
7 Allen W. Wood, ‘Hegel and Marxism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993), p. 416.
8 Hegel uses erfahren for ‘experience’, the root meaning of which is ‘to set out on a journey to explore or get to
know something’. (Inwood 1992: 95).
9 Ibid. 1, p. 213.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., p. 438.

3
Anna exhibits an acute sense of self-awareness, however, whereby, as Taylor has noted,
offering an Hegelian interpretation, the novel ‘is the stage where the formal and ideological
contradictions of both realism and liberal humanism are most explicitly acted out and the
position of the self-conscious, angst-ridden, isolated woman artist debated’.12 To put it in
Hegelian terms, Anna is self-conscious in that she is for herself, her self-conception, is an
important component of what she is in herself. How she appears to herself is part of what she
actually is. This, for Hegel, is the definition of self –consciousness:13
This in-itself has to express itself outwardly and become for-itself, and this means simply that it has to posit
self-consciousness as one with-itself.14
It follows from this that it is possible for Anna to make herself different through
apprehending herself as different. And because that which Anna is in herself is at any time
the consequence of such an unfolding process that is conditioned by her attitudes, as a self-
conscious individual she has a history as well as a past. Anna thereby provides for herself an
historical narrative,15 a distinctive method of understanding herself as an historical, self-
conscious individual.
But if to be for herself an historical individual is to constitute herself as in herself a self-
consciously historical individual, this raises the question, what does it mean for anything to
be something for something else? For Hegel ‘self-consciousness is Desire’,16 whereby
objects are classified into those that satisfy the desire and those that do not, and at the very
least the most basic form of Anna’s self-awareness may be understood as a development of
12 Jenny Taylor, ‘Introduction: situating reading’ (in Taylor 1982: pp. 1 – 42), p. 7.
13 Lessing’s ‘biggest problem’ is to be ‘always wrestling with words that haven’t got the meaning you want
them to have’. (Ingersoll 1996: , p. 92).
14 Georg Wilhelm Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, para. 26.
15 Hegel’s ‘Erinnerung’, which means ‘a reminder’, but also ‘memory, recollection’. (Inwood: 1992, p. 186).
‘[He] takes erinnern to mean, not ‘remind’… but ‘to internalize’…’. (ibid., p. 187).
16 Ibid. 14, para. 174.

4
the primary structure of her sexual awareness, including her responsive activity. As Wilson
has said, ‘Lessing… rejects lesbianism and masturbation as alike pathetic substitutes which
bring only disgust and self-hatred. [Her] sexuality is a response to a man. It must also be a
response to love. Anna, through her creation Ella, bitterly laments the fact that men do not
‘really love’ women, and cannot therefore give them the ‘true’ vaginal orgasm. She longs
only to be swept away by such a love’.17 As Anna tells us about Ella:
… she realises she is falling into a lie about herself, and about women… that when she was with Paul she
felt no sex hungers that were not prompted by him… that her present raging sexual hunger was not for sex,
but was fed by all the emotional hungers of her life… A woman’s sexuality is… contained by a man, if he is
a real man; she is, in a sense, put to sleep by him, she does not think about sex.18
The object of her desire, Paul, has a subjective significance for Ella, defined by the attitude
that motivates her sexual activity. But Ella also assesses Paul, attributing to him an objective
significance, that which he is in himself, that is to say, a ‘real man’. If, however, the object
that was for Ella had not corresponded with what it was in itself this inconsonance would
have resulted in sexual disappointment.
Such experiential episodes are part of a process of learning, and in Ella’s case, her
subjectively appropriate responsive tendencies towards different objects of possible desire
satisfaction become more reliable, in the sense of being more objectively appropriately with
regard to the desire that motivates her sexual activity:
… men approached her and she refused them, because she knew she could not love them. The words she
used to herself were: I won’t sleep with a man until I know I could love him.19
17 Elizabeth Wilson, ‘Yesterday’s heroines’, (in Taylor 1982: pp. 57 – 74), p. 65 – 66.
18 Ibid. 1, p. 426.
19 Ibid.

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As Wilson puts it, with regard to Anna/Ella: ‘when she is aroused by a man who means
nothing to her emotionally, she catalogues with disgust the physical manifestations of her
arousal’.20 As for Anna’s assessing activity, concerning whether the object in question is in
itself a ‘real man’, she explains the criteria she employs when making such an assessment, in
her description of the American communist Nelson’s courtship of her: ‘He was talking about
me, the sort of life I led. And women always respond at once to men who understand we are
on some kind of frontier… they ‘name’ us. We feel safe with them’.21
Anna is thereby assessor and assessed, which is to say, if her self-consciousness is desire it
is also reciprocal recognition, or taking something as something that something else can be
something for, that is, recognizing it. To be a self-consciousness, as Hegel has said, is to be
something other things can be something for, that is, ‘self-consciousness… exists only in
being acknowledged’.22 To be merely for oneself is not to be self-conscious, for ‘it is only
the motionless tautology od: ‘I am I’.23 Anna’s self-consciousness is in need of another self-
consciousness that presents it objectively with an ideal with which it can identify, a woman
‘on some kind of frontier’. Self-consciousness is a social achievement: ‘A self-consciousness
exists for a self-consciousness’, which is to say, it is an ‘‘I’ that is ‘We’ and ‘We’ that is’I’’.24
Anna’s recognition of an ideal man is appropriate given her desire to be recognized as an
ideal woman, a woman ‘on some kind of frontier’, but there is inevitably a disparity between
the self that she is and that which she wants to be. That an ideal aspect, her self-conception,
becomes in this way important to what she is imposes a history upon her, which is to say, by
altering through experience what she is for herself, she develops rather than merely changes.
And Anna is enabled to make a decision about who she is through her pursuit of that detail,
her self-conception, what she is for herself, through identification with that which she is
20 Ibid., p. 66.
21 Ibid., p. 451.
22 Ibid. 14, para. 178.
23 Ibid., para. 167.

6
willing to put at risk and perhaps sacrifice. As I am thereby no longer speaking in terms of
Anna’s desires but rather of her commitments, her discovery of her sense of independence, as
a woman ‘on some kind of frontier’, can be explicated in terms of Hegel’s account of a self
encountering another self as it endeavours to determine whether this other self, in this cae
Anna’s ‘real man’, is itself independent:
The presentation of itself… consists in showing… that it is not attached to life… In so far as it is the action
of the other, each seeks the death of the other… But in doing so… action on its own part, is also involved…
the staking of its own life.25
This struggle to the death is a metonymic figure for something more comprehensive, of
course, in that the pivotal component in Anna’s development towards independence is a
willingness to risk her life in the service of a commitment, that is, that which surpasses a
simple desire, such identification being a matter of her willingness to risk and possibly
sacrifice something she actually is in herself for something she is for herself, even if what is
risked is not her life, but only other commitments.26 For instance, she sacrifices her job at the
Party’s publishing house for her ethical principles, no longer accepting ‘the self-deceptive
myths’,27 or its ‘intellectual rottenness’,28 and yet she tells us:
… when I leave the Party… I am going to miss… the company of people who have spent their lives in a
certain kind of atmosphere, where it is taken for granted that their lives must be related to a central
philosophy.29
26 As Sprague has pointed out, Lessing always ‘comes down for commitment over noncommitment and for risk
over safe repetition’. (Sprague 1987: p. 53).
27 Ibid. 1, p. 324.
28 Ibid., p. 326.
29 Ibid., p. 321.

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Her sacrifice is a self-constituting act of identification with an ideal in the same sense that
risking or sacrificing her life for it would be, as: ‘The Communist Party, like any other
institution, continues to exist by a process of absorbing its critics into itself. It either absorbs
them or destroys them’.30 Anna refuses to be absorbed, but her simple independence is now
an empty abstract ambition,31 and thereby contradictory, the resolution of which can be
accounted for in terms of Hegel’s indirect representation of two self-consciousnesses that are
locked in conflict: ‘… one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be
for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is… to be for
another. The former is lord, the other is bondsman’,32 whereby there is ‘one being only
recognized, the other only recognizing’.33
Anna adopts a submissive consciousness as she pursues not her own desires and ideals, but
those of Nelson, her ‘real man’, who tells Anna that ‘he had a mortal terror of sex, could
never stay inside a woman for longer than a few seconds, and had never been different’.34
Anna asks herself:
….why did I go on with it? It wasn’t the self-flattery: I can cure this man… the truth is, women have this
deep instinctive need to build a man up as a man… what terrifies me is my willingness. It is what Mother
Sugar35 would call ‘the negative side’ of the woman’s need to placate, to submit. Now I am not Anna, I
have no will…36
However, Nelson, as dominant, and thereby rejecting any constraint on his self-constitutive
authority, is himself a product of Anna’s formative activity, as she builds him up. Anna can
she herself in this product of her labour, an expression of her development toward self-
30 Ibid., p. 322.
31 That is, she lingers at ‘some kind of frontier’.
32 Ibid. 14, para. 189.
34 Ibid., p. 453.
35 Anna’s psychotherapist.
36 Ibid.

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understanding, but as she strives to understand her self-conscious individuality she becomes
unhappy with her dependent existence as a recognized or constituted consciousness. As
Hegel puts it:
… the duplication which formerly was divided between two individuals, the lord and the bondsman, is now
lodged in one… the Unhappy Consciousness is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely
contradictory being.37
Anna has attained the condition which Harris has described as ‘the pole of spiritual despair.
This self is the unity of two absolutely opposed selves’.38
Anna would be for herself what she is in herself if she understood that a social
configuration alone can reconcile the contradictions that are incompatible in her individual
self. Instead, she sees her dual nature as originating in two different kinds of thing, that is,
herself as a dependent individual desiring self, that which she experiences as being
fragmented, but which opposes that which Hegel calls the unchangeable,39 her celestial ‘real
man’, figuratively speaking, for whom there is no distinction between what things are for it
and what they are in themselves.
It is this that makes possible Anna’s experience of herself as fragmented, as she cannot
unite herself with that which is unchangeable without conveying her own changeableness into
it, initiating further struggle for herself, an instance of which is her sense of justice40 being
offended with the feel of her lover Michael’s erection against her buttocks as they are lying in
bed:
38 H. S. Harris, Hegel: Phenomenology and System (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1995), pp. 42 –
43.
39 ‘… [the unhappy consciousness]comes before itself as opposed to the unchangeable essence’. (Ibid. 14, para.
2100.
40 Derrida claims that ‘an idea of justice’ could supply the liberating possibility of Marxism, (Derrida 1994: p.
59), but this would result in just this sort of unhappiness.

9
Of course he chooses now, when I am unrelaxed and listening for Janet. But the anger is not related to
him… It is the disease of women in our time… The woman’s emotion: resentment against justice, an
impersonal poison. The unlucky ones, who do not know it is impersonal, turn it against their men. The
lucky ones like me – fight it.41
Anna’s initial response to this struggle, however, is a retreat into her inner feelings, in
reverence to the power over her that she grants to her ideal ‘real man’. It is a ‘movement of
an infinite yearning’,42 as Hegel describes it, the expression of a religious sensibility, in
effect, a ‘struggle of the heart and emotions’,43 whereby her ‘thinking is no more than the
chaotic jingling of bells, or a mist of warm incense’,44 or more precisely, in Anna’s case, and
expressed through her dream states, like cavorting butterflies:
… I was faced with the burden of re-creating order out of the chaos that my life had become. Time had
gone, and my memory did not exist, and I was unable to distinguish between what I had invented and what I
had known, and I knew that what I had invented was false. It was a whirl, an orderless dance, like the dance
of the white butterflies in a shimmer of heat over the damp sandy vlei.45
Anna recounts through her dreams this most subjective sense of her changeable individuality
in opposition with that which is unchangeable, Anna’s ideal self-conception that is at risk of
disintegration:
…there was personality apart from the Anna who lay asleep… who that person is I do not know. It was a
person concerned to prevent the disintegration of Anna.
41 Ibid., p. 312.
45 Ibid. 1, p. 579.

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As I lay on the surface of the dream-water, and began very slowly to submerge, this person said: ‘Anna,
you are betraying everything you believe in; you are sunk in subjectivity, yourself, your own needs’… The
admonishing person said: ‘Fight. Fight. Fight’.46
Anna thereby aspires through ‘work and enjoyment’ to make her ‘unsubstantial existence a
reality’.47 As she envisages writing another story about Ella, she tells us that:
… I could positively mark the point where Ella left reality… I was thinking that quite possibly these
marvellous, generous things we walk side by side with in our imagination could come into existence, simply
because we need them, because we imagine them. Then I began to laugh because of the distance between
what I was imagining and what in fact I was, let alone what Ella was.48
In accordance with the religious analogy, anna hasa discovered sin,49 expressed through her
assessment of her novel Frontiers of War:50
I said nothing in it that wasn’t true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the
unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the
jungle, for formlessness. It is clear to me that I can’t read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I
were in a street naked.51
Anna’s consciousness now ‘renounces the show of satisfying its feeling of self’, while
languishing in guilt, for she ‘obtains the actual satisfaction of it… for it has been desire,
work, and enjoyment’.52 Her next phase is described by Hegel thus:
46 Ibid., p. 574.
47 Ibid. 14, para. 223.
48 Ibid. 1, p, 595.
49 Anna describes her creation as ‘the woman altogether betterthan I was’, ibid., p. 595.
50 Inspired by Anna’s experiences in Central Africa, before and during World War II: ‘A period of imaginative
schizophrenia’, according to Sage, during which Lessing herself ‘was becoming… a psychic communist, [who]
had… ‘turned her mind around…’’. (Sage 1983: p. 71).
51Ibid. 1, p. 60.
52 Ibid. 14, para. 222.

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… as regards the contradictory relation in which consciousnes takes its own reality to be immediately a
nothingness, its actual doing thus becomes a doing of nothing….53
Hence, Anna’s writer’s block.54
There then follows a process whereby Anna renounces her dependence of her particular self
on her ideal, as she sacrifices her individuality by giving up her will or authority to decide for
herself what things are for her:
… consciousness, having nullified the action as its own doing… the surrender of one’s own will is… the
positing of will as the will of an ‘other’… the will which, precisely because it is an ‘other’ for consciousness,
becomes actual for it, not through the Unhappy Consciousness itself, but through a Third, the mediator as
counsellor.55
Saul is the counsellor that is to bring Anna into harmony with her ideal self-conception.
Anna mocks him, accusing him of ‘making sets of moral axioms to save us both with, like
mottoes out of Christmas crackers’,56 but she also tells him ‘you’ve become a sort of inner
conscience or critic…’.57 Anna’s unhappy consciousness, as Hegel says, thereby attempts to
‘free itself from action and enjoyment, so far as they are regarded as its own’, and it ‘casts
upon the mediator or minister [priest] its own freedom of decision, and herewith
responsibility for its own action’.58 That is, it has ‘’… divested itself of its ‘I’…. having
turned its immediate consciousness into a Thing, into an objective existence’.59 Anna finally
53 Ibid. 14, para. 225.
54 Or at least we could speculate so, were it not for Anna’s ontological status, that is, outside the fiction that is
The Golden Notebook the designator ‘Ann Wulf’ has a failure of reference.
55 Ibid. 14, para. 230.
56 Ibid. 1, p. 596.
57 Ibid., p. 580.
58 Ibid. 14, para. 228.
59 Ibid., para. 229. Hegel says that: ‘Consciousness is aware of itself as this actual individual in the animal
functions’, (ibid., para. 225), and this is what we find with me: ‘… my body was distasteful to me… when I saw

12
decides ‘to join the Labour Party and teach a night-class twice a week for delinquent kids’,
thereby achieving an objective existence by becoming ‘integrated with British life at its
roots’.60
Anna herself, of course, would be scornful of such a reading of a text that, as Taylor puts it,
‘paradoxically, both operates within and frustrates a consistent history based on the unilinear
progression of narrative time’,61 and that, as Hanson argues, ‘reflects almost every possible
stage and process in the dehumanisation… of the individual… and should be seen as
postmodern and placed in the context of such critics as… Derrida’.62 And for Wilson,
‘Marxism and psychoanalysis – the theories she has used to make sense of her life – in the
end mask the formless inner reality’.63
Anna herself makes explicit to Mother Sugar her view of ‘individuation’:
‘So far what it has meant to me is this: that the individual recognizes one part after another of his earlier life
as an aspect of the general human experience. When he can say: What I did then, what I felt then, is only the
reflection of that… stage in history, then he is free, because he has separated himself from the
experience…’64
Anna is ‘convinced that there are whole areas of me made by the kind of experience women
haven’t had before’,65 and that ‘the raw unfinished quality in my life was precisely what was
my breasts all I could think of was how they were when they were full of milk, and instead of this being
pleasurable, it was revolting’. (Ibid. 1, pp. 571 – 572)
60 Ibid., p. 622.
61 Ibid., pp. 7 – 8.
62 Clare Hanson, ‘Doris Lessing in Pursuit of the English’ (in Sprague 1990: pp. 61 – 73), p. 68. Similarly,
Bentley’s reading suggests Lessing conjectures on the form and function of the novel, relative to the
literary/cultural debates of the 1950s/1960s and to British postmodernism. (Bentley 2009: pp. 44 – 60).
63 Ibid., p. 62
64 Ibid. 1, p. 441.
65 Ibid.

13
valuable in it and I should holds fast to it’,66 and Wilson claims that ‘both art and theory in
the end go against this feeling’.67
But experience for Anna is something that she does as well as something that happens to
her, and her experience of her ‘formless inner reality’ is to be understood within the context
of her own self-conception and understanding of herself as self-constituting. And as regards
any professed ‘incredulity toward metanarratives’,68 as Lyotard defines the postmodern
condition, for Hegel such scepticism expresses a ‘polemical bearing towards the manifest
independence of things’,69 that is, in the absence of any primary sceptical theory, it enacts a
piecemeal strategy of noncommitment to each claim seeking confirmation, as lacking in
justification:
Point out likeness or identity to it, and it will point out unlikeness or non-identity; and when it is confronted
with what it has just now asserted, it turns round and points out likeness or identity.70
It will therefore be objected that my quotations from the narrative have been intentionally
arranged to accord with a philosophical paradigm, precluding any stage at which the
metanarrative may be challenged. But if Anna’s experience presents to her something that
she assesses to be real, including her ‘real man’, but is instead a deceptive manner by which
something else appears, it is thereby not the process through which her consciousness
develops and educates itself, but only ‘a highway of despair’.71
66 Ibid., p. 221.
67 Ibid. 17, p. 62.
68 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1997), Introduction, p. xxiv.
69 Ibid. 14, para. 202.
71 Ibid., para. 78.

14
However, as Mother Sugar tells Anna, ‘the end of an analysis does not mean the end of the
experience itself’.72 Anna may develop into a ‘free woman’, but her commitment to freedom,
as Schlueter has said, ‘is both relative and continually in need of re-examination and
modification as life goes on’.73 Shaw, in reference to Tennyson’s The Making of Man, has
said that only ‘a man who is created in the image of an unchanging God is committed in
advance to a definition of who and what man is’.74 And for Lessing, an avowed ‘architect of
the soul’,75 only at the completion of the construction could she declaim, with the poet’s
‘prophet-eyes’: ‘Hallelujah to the Maker ‘It is finish’d. Man is made’’,76 an espousal,
according to Shaw, of ‘Hegel’s idea that the end of any self-constituting process is
immeasurably greater than its beginning’.77
Bibliography
Bentley, Nick, ‘Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: An Experiment in Critical Fiction’, in
Border Crossings, edited by Alice Ridout and Susan Watkins (New York: Continuum, 2009),
pp. 44 – 60.
Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx, translated by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge,
1994).
Harris, H. S., Hegel: Phenomenology and System (Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company,
Inc., 1995).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by A. V. Millar
Kaufmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
72 Ibid. 1, p. 235.
73 Paul Schlueter, The Novels of Doris Lessing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), p. 116.
74 David W. Shaw, The Lucid Veil (London: The Athlone Press Ltd., 1987), p. 252.
75 Doris Lessing, ‘A Small Personal Voice’, in Declaration (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), p. 190.
76 Alfred Tennyson, Poems and Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 827.
77 Ibid 73.

15
Ingersoll, Earl G. (ed.), Putting the Questions Differently: Interviews with Doris Lessing 1964
– 1994 (London: Flamingo, 1996).
Inwood, Michael, A Hegel Dictionary (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1992).
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, Collected Works, Vol. 38, Philosophical Notebooks (London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1961).
Lessing, Doris, ‘A Small Personal Voice’, in Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler (London:
MacGibbon & Kee, 1957), pp. 187 – 201.
Lessing, Doris, The Golden Notebook (London: Harper Perennial, 1994).
Lyotard, Jean-François, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
Sage, Lorna, Doris Lessing (London: Methuen, 1983).
Schlueter, Paul, The Novels of Doris Lessing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1973).
Shaw, W. David, The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age (London: The Athlone
Press Ltd., 1987).
Sprague, Claire (ed.), In Pursuit of Doris Lessing: Nine Nations Reading (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1990).
Sprague, Claire, Rereading Doris Lessing: Narrative Patterns of Doubling and Repetition
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).
Taylor, Jenny (editor), Notebooks/Memoirs/Archives: Reading and Rereading Doris Lessing
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).
Tennyson, Alfred, Poems and Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
Thorpe, Michael, Writers and their Work: Doris Lessing (London: Longman Group Ltd.,
1973).

16
Wood, Allen W., ‘Hegel and Marxism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hegel, edited by
Frederick C. Beiser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 414 – 444.

The Historicity of Self

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