Anna Wulf refers to two different characters in The Golden Notebook: There is the Anna of the novel-within-the-novel, Free Women, and there is the Anna who keeps the notebooks. Thus, Anna is both protagonist and writer, and as such she represents the actual author, Doris Lessing. She struggles, in both cases, with the idea of independence, and she remains, for much of the novel, mired in cyclical patterns that leave her feeling undervalued and devoid of creativity—the result, in part, of her unsatisfying relationships with men. To her credit, she does not blame these men for her predicament—the men, too, are trapped in unfulfilling circumstances brought on by socio-historical changes—but she seeks an identity that breaks free of conventional definitions of womanhood. She wants to love, and to be loved, but not at the expense of her creative self. She is also grappling with a world fundamentally disrupted by war and violence, which presents its own crisis regarding creativity: Anna cannot understand how one can make art in the face of such destruction.

The Anna of Free Women represents what would have happened should the Anna of the notebooks (that is, the author herself) have been unable able to overcome her writer’s block.