About the Book
‘A lovely, urgent, serious book' Tessa Hadley
‘Refreshing and unexpected’ Daisy Hay, Financial Times
Lara Feigel listens to birds outside her window – their circling, strident calls – and thinks of D. H. Lawrence. It is the spring of 2020 and, as the pandemic takes hold, she locks down in rural Oxfordshire with her partner, her two children, and that most explosive of writers.
Proceeding month by month through the year, she sets out to start again with Lawrence: to find vital literary companionship; to use him as a guide to rural living and even, unexpectedly, to child-rearing; to find a way through his writing to excavate the modern world she feels he helped bring into being. Tracing the arc of Lawrence’s life and delving deep into his writings, she confronts his anger, his passion, his tumultuous vitality. In the process, she faces some of today’s most urgent dilemmas, from secular religion to the climate crisis, from sex and sexuality to feminism’s ideas about motherhood. And, as she watches the seasons change alongside Lawrence, Feigel finds the rhythms of her own life shifting in unexpected ways.
Brilliantly interweaving literary criticism, biography and memoir, Look! We Have Come Through! is a captivating exhumation of an author and a compelling manifesto for exposing ourselves to difficult and dangerous views.
About the Author :
Lara Feigel is a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London. She is the author of four previous works of non-fiction: Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930-1945 (2009), The Love-charm of Bombs (2013), The Bitter Taste of Victory (2016) and Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (2018), as well as one novel, The Group (2020). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and writes regularly for the Guardian and other publications. Lara lives in Oxfordshire.
www.larafeigel.com
@larafeigel
Review :
Refreshing and unexpected … The case for reading, and for thinking hard and seriously about the role of reading in a world characterised by fracture, is powerfully made.
A perceptive book … a critical biography but also a pandemic memoir – a story about how an author can inform and change your life … Part of the attraction of the book is Feigel’s candour: the charting of her ups and downs as the seasons pass. If she weren’t so attuned to Lawrence, it would feel ickily self-absorbed ... Her intensity and intimacy are engaging
To be able to meet the world unillusioned but undismayed is what Lawrence did for Lara Feigel, and it is what she hopes he can do for us as a result of her bracing and honest book. Each chapter homes in on a major topic and Feigel has something fresh to say in every case … Some of the sharpest, shrewdest discussions I have seen of Lawrence for a long time.
Feigel’s book is itself Lawrentian: sprightly, capacious, passionate, inquisitive and complex
A lovely, urgent, serious book, making me think about Lawrence and life all over again.
Through an intimate engagement with a brilliant, ever-provocative writer, Lara Feigel navigates the pandemic and a storm-tossed year in her own life as woman and mother. By turns troubled, tender and bold, this absorbing book brings Lawrence's vivid talent and ideas close, testing them against the pressures of the contemporary.
Lara Feigel wrestles with Lawrence, resents him, adores him and even tries to learn from him, all while Covid rages; it makes for a daring and unconventional bibliomemoir that might change the way you feel about sex, motherhood, work, illness and faith.
A fiercely intelligent engagement with Lawrence, half memoir and half critical biography, in which Lara Feigel comes in at a series of oblique angles to reach some startling judgments. I was highly impressed.
Feigel’s Lawrence is an untimely, urgent teacher of life and its passions. Agile, surprising and compulsively absorbing, Look! We Have Come Through! is the perfect tonic for the cynical, jaded spirit of our time.
Both an analysis of what makes Lawrence so troublingly intoxicating, and an account of what happens when we succumb to the writers we admire. Clear-headed, yet also strangely intuitive, what makes Lara Feigel’s writing so seductive is the way she seems to absorb Lawrence’s influence so deeply into herself that he becomes her own.
Praise for Free Woman: A fascinating mix of literary criticism, cultural history and memoir … Highly enjoyable
An extraordinary meditation on what it means to be a clever, engaged woman … A classical, precise use of language … Most compelling … Physically and intellectually intimate
The most intriguing and certainly the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read
Ironic, beautiful and rather moving
Free Woman is not a biography, but the same artistic process is at work: as a biographer, you think you are going to possess your subject, but they always end up possessing you. It’s fertile ground, and Feigel a fine explorer.
Free Woman has taken on the formidable Doris for a new generation … Feigel has the gift of converting complex thoughts into coherent sentences that delight
