While Doris Lessing was composing The Golden Notebook, she was intimately involved with Clancy Sigal and their relationship influenced the literary methods of both writers. Focusing on literary transformations, Rubenstein offers compelling insights into the ethical implications of disguised autobiography and roman a clef .

In a number of narratives by contemporary women writers, nostalgia or homesickness functions not regressively but affirmatively as a vehicle for "fixing" the past: for imaginatively transforming a character's relation to spaces, places, history, memory, and/or cultural exile or displacement.

This book brings together Virginia Woolf's essays and book reviews on Russian literature; her unpublished reading notes on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and Turgenev; and new and insightful scholarly commentary concerning her response to each of the major Russian writers.