We think that our children belong to us, but families are fragile things.
Every day, for over a century, children have been moved between homes because of law cases that decide their fates. Yet child custody is curiously absent from history books and from how we generally understand our world. Lara Feigel’s groundbreaking book shows the fraught, complex territory of child custody to have been one of the vital battlegrounds of modern history and culture.
Custody is the story of seven women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of matrimony in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts.
It’s a book of dramatic storytelling, and of blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation. Each chapter immerses the reader in the life and times – and struggles – of these fascinating, charismatic, complex women and their children. All of these women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too – writers, lovers, or activists – and they and their children were punished for these attempts.
Feigel has been deep in the archives, looking into thousands of other cases in each place and time, and she’s been sitting in on the family courts in the present. So alongside these central figures, the book presents a teeming picture of fractured family life in Britain, Europe and North America across two hundred years, offering a major new interpretation of how our modern culture has evolved. And Custody is an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care.
This book is of urgent interest to anyone concerned with women’s roles in the world and how institutions fail them. Ultimately it’s a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet. Custody cases can seem in these chapters to be quintessentially tragic, but the stories of these passionate, conflicted women also make us want to figure out how to do things better.
About the Author :
Lara Feigel is the author of four highly acclaimed works of cultural history and a novel. Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King's College London and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she reviews regularly for the Guardian and contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. Most recently, Feigel appeared as a lead contributor in the landmark BBC 1 cultural history of the interwar years, Art that Made Us; in 2023 she will be writing and presenting a programme about Doris Lessing for the Radio 4 prestigious Archive Hour slot.
Review :
'An absorbing and heart-breaking study, opening a window into the past and urgently contemporary at the same time.' Tessa Hadley, prize-winning of The Past
'Powerful and moving, this is also an important book. I couldn’t put it down. Feigel illuminates the pain the legal system has inflicted on children and mothers through to our own time, when courts too often lag behind the reality of living arrangements.' Lisa Appignanesi, author of Losing the Dead
'Custody is a powerful, courageous and essential book. This is far more than a historical account: it is a vital reckoning with the present. An urgent, necessary read for anyone who cares about the future of family law and the safety of women and children’ Charlotte Proudman, author of He Said, She Said
'Here, in all their fascinating, irreducible complexity, are Anna Karenina’s real-life sisters. Finely researched and beautifully written, Custody carries a very considerable personal, political and emotional charge. A major achievement.' David Kynaston, author of A Northern Wind: Britain 1962-65
'Bravo! Feigel demonstrates a true storyteller’s gift for activating landmark historical custody cases, with all their complexity, patriarchal architecture and inhumanity. Feigel shines a light into the dank, secret corners of an opaque, often misogynistic system. This book is vital, timely and profoundly disturbing.' Sarah Hall, prize-winning author of Helm
