At the end of the 1950s, as she finished the third of her Martha Quest novels, Lessing was writing The Golden Notebook, moving away from the conventional realism of the three earlier works to experiment with structure. For its structuring is crucial to a reading of The Golden Notebook. As we have seen, many of its themes had been present in the Martha Quest books, and The Golden Notebook is also set in historical context: this is the world of the Korean War, and of the Cold War which succeeded the Second World War, a world where empires were dying. This is a world responding to the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party when Stalin's brutality was denounced, only to be followed by the savage Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution and the rise of McCarthyism in the States; this was also a world with growing awareness of the threat of nuclear war, a world where the Rosenbergs, convicted of spying, were sent to the electric chair. Such is the book's wider political context; but it is also a book written by a woman, and one who does not want us to separate personal relationships from what is going on in the world. In the preface that Lessing added nine years later, she describes the shape of the work:

Lessing again explores the patterns and formulas we make as individuals, as societies, to make ourselves feel secure.