Jenna Kumiega
I have worshipped Doris Lessing as a literary goddess since reading The Golden Notebook. I was in my twenties, living in London, and going through a period of major change and challenge. Doris writes with a sublime combination of intellectual clarity and psychological compassion. The greatest lesson she taught me, which on many occasions has kept me sane and functioning, is that it is possible to be both full of intelligent wisdom, and yet profoundly confused at the same time. That is a very human (and humane) message!
Laurie Spencer
It is over 30 years since I read this but I remember the impact of it, and sentences rising out of the page to hit me with their vision.
Joanna Reid
What struck me about this book was its insight into women's orgasms! The first I have ever read and spot on, as it were . . .!
alice swirle
I too read it in my 20s, but in the 1990s. Nothing has made me feel closer to the women who fought for my freedoms, not least because we're still negotiating the same desires, needs and frustrations. And 10 years since I read it, I can still smell the wild strawberries wafting up to the window from the cart on the London street below.
Alex Docherty
I read this book in my mid-thirties:it resonated so much with my current concerns, family, work, politics, hugely empathetic; Thankyou Doris Lessing.
Gillean Somerville-Arjat
Out of the long list I had to go for this book. I have been a voracious reader all my life and my reading has often fallen into phases, so I had my Doris Lessing phase in my late twenties. There were aspects of her thinking that I could not share, but this book impressed me enormously by its depth and scope. I had liked the Brontes and George Eliot, of course, but no woman had written like this before. It seemed a tremendous leap of consciousness, a total break with the traditional mould of women's narratives.
Gale Chrisman
It was 1963,I was 22, with a 5 month old daughter, freshly separated from my husband.A lecturer at my college,a woman for whom I had done some work and who had befriended me, gave me this novel to celebrate the birth of my child .My circumstances as a single-mother, the gift-giver's friendliness and generosity, my youth and the sprawling life and honesty of the novel, a novel unlike any other I had read, came together forcefully. I felt embraced by the women and the world of Lessing's novel. I would manage just fine, I felt, as part of this world.
Janice Lukas
Liberating and so very insightful.
Caroline Joly
I read it aged 20 at a time when I was reaching out to the world as a young independent woman. The sparkiness of the women was intoxicating, and their independence of mind and emotion gave me the strength to be the woman I wanted to be.
Liesbeth Williams
I was 20 something. The writing gave me the knowledge that I could be who I was. I could be intelligent and strong, yet want to have lots of children. I could make mistakes, and move on. I could step out of my present life, and move into something different, and that I could do this on my own. It was so liberating.
Susie Tarbush
At times when I have been racked with uncertainty I found the book wise, comforting, true and intelligent.
