The Golden Notebook

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1962

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1

Part 2, Chapters 1-4

Part 3

Part 4, Chapters 1-4

Part 5

Part 6, Chapters 1-4

Part 7

Part 8, Chapters 1-4

Part 9

Part 10

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 10Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 10: “Free Women: 5”

Part 10 Summary: “Molly gets married and Anna has an affair.”

Janet goes away to boarding school, and Anna sinks into a kind of malaise. She knows that when Janet returns from school, she will revert back to her responsible self, but right now, she has too much time on her hands. She begins cutting out articles from the newspaper and pasting them all over her walls. She tries to make sense of the fragments, but if any common thread exists, it eludes her. She has not written in her notebooks since the incident with Tommy.

Molly sends over a new prospective tenant, an American named Milt. He asks her to sleep with him; she does. He takes down all of her pastings and tries to read her notebooks. She asks him not to, but he does anyway. They bicker back and forth about the nature of their relationship. Anna finally asks him to stay; he says he must leave.

After he goes, Janet returns from school, finding her mother “in the process of finding another, smaller flat, and getting a job” (664). Molly has called to say that she is getting married and leaving her house to Marion and Tommy. Tommy will begin working for Richard soon; Marion is running a dress shop. Anna and Molly sit in Molly’s kitchen, eating lunch, while they discuss Molly’s marriage and Anna’s new job, offering advice to married couples. Anna returns to her flat, where Janet will be waiting for her.

Part 10 Analysis

Anna’s daughter, Janet, acts as the foil to her mother. Where Anna is unconventional, albeit often uncomfortably so, Janet is content to follow a more certain path. Anna imagines Janet saying, “I want to be ordinary, I don’t want to be like you” (647). Anna understands that Janet craves routine and certainty, after having seen “the world of disorder, experiment, where people lived day to day, like balls perpetually jiggling on the top of jets of prancing water; keeping themselves open for any new feeling or adventure, and had decided it was not for her” (647). While Anna tries to warn Janet how different her experience of boarding school will be, Janet is confident that she will thrive.

Once Janet is gone, however, Anna herself has nothing stable to orient her to a routine. She is no longer able to write, even in her notebooks: The incident with Tommy has permanently shaken her. As she explains, when warning Milt not to read the notebooks, “Only one person read them. He tried to kill himself, failed, blinded himself, and has now turned into what he tried to kill himself to prevent” (659). She believes her writing is not only without purpose but also dangerous. This explains, at least in part, why the Anna of Free Women relinquishes her role as writer. She will take a job, ironically, as a kind of marriage counselor.

Her relationship to Milt is an echo of Anna’s relationship with Saul, as explored in the blue and golden notebooks. It is shorter and less agonistic in the novelized retelling, but it is also marked by the disconnect between Anna’s desires for commitment, and Milt’s desires for independence. Ironically, however, in the end, it is Milt who wishes to “preserve the forms” (664) by suggesting that they keep in touch—a rather half-hearted and banal attempt to be gallant. Anna is more honest: “But we won’t” (664). Still, the Anna of Free Women will end her career as a writer. She will sell her flat—there are to be no more unconventional tenants, either—and dedicate herself to Janet and to less controversial political causes (Labour Party, teaching underprivileged children). Ultimately, she is not at all like the Anna of the notebooks.