The Golden Notebook

"The thing that I thought so fabulous about Doris Lessing was that she created a heroine who was intellectual and sexual. Always in the past, the sexy heroines of men’s books have been idiots, but she asserted through her character of Anna that women were brains and bodies and that their brains and bodies interacted. I think that was so revolutionary. I was just in Rome, taking my seven-year-old grandson through Roma Antica, and I reread Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar, written in 1951; she says in an afterward to the book that it was impossible to imagine a female hero. I have to say that when I was at graduate school we didn’t read about female heroes. We didn’t read Emily Dickinson. It was so important that Doris Lessing came along and wrote a heroine who was sexual and intellectual; she grappled with the issues of socialism, communism, Africa in turmoil, and yet at the same time she lusted for men and talked about the confusions of her love affairs. That is very sad. The bimbo doesn’t necessarily represent freedom. It might, but being a slave to wearing four-inch heels and see-through blouses doesn’t equal feminism. It equals an obsession with being noticed by men and defining yourself by men’s rules. I used to be deeply criticised in the 1970s for being a feminist who liked men. They used to boo me off the stage. Feminism at that time was so angry and so focused on wearing ugly clothes that people were furious at me. I was considered an anti-revolutionary. So, to see these shifts is fascinating. One of the wonderful things about growing older is the way you see these circles. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Wearing net stockings and these horrible platforms. Do you remember when there were lots of fashion models falling on the runways? And many others. The Internet was full of videos of women falling and I thought, that’s what we’ve come to. Wearing shoes that are dangerous. I’ve taken to buying the prettiest flats I can. I live in New York and it’s a great walking city. When I go to a party, I take the fancy shoes in a bag and sometimes I don’t even change into the fancy shoes because I know how miserable I’ll feel."