Free Woman
‘A fascinating mix of literary criticism, cultural history and memoir … Highly enjoyable’ Sunday Times
How might we live more freely, and will we be happier or lonelier if we do? Rereading The Golden Notebook in her thirties, Lara Feigel discovered that Doris Lessing spoke directly to her as a woman, writer and mother in a way that no other novelist had done.
Veering between admiration and fury at the choices Lessing made, Feigel conducts a dazzling investigation into the joys and costs of sexual, psychological, intellectual and political freedom. The result is this genre-defying book: at once a meditation on life and literature and a daring act of self-exposure.
Lara Feigel is a Reader in Modern Literature and Culture at King's College London. She is the author of Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930–1945 and the editor (with Alexandra Harris) of Modernism on Sea: Art and Culture at the British Seaside and (with John Sutherland) of the New Selected Journals of Stephen Spender. She has also written for the Guardian, the Financial Times and Prospect. The Love-charm of Bombs (2013) and The Bitter Taste of Victory (2016) were both published to critical acclaim. Lara lives in Oxfordshire.
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