This article examines novels by two postwar British women writers, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, within the context of twentieth-century feminism and its experiments with a postmodernist form of writing. The article examines how these two novels, in different ways, use strategies derived from both realist and postmodernist forms to achieve two ends: first, to reach out to a popular female readership by depicting the everyday challenges faced by women both inside the home and outside the household, and second, to subvert patriarchal ideas with innovative uses of a self-reflexive narrative form. I demonstrate that there are diverse and rich possibilities in these mid-twentieth-century narratives that freely avail of several realist and postmodernist strategies to raise feminist questions and offer answers.
Aduri et al. (Wed,) studied this question.