Look! We Have Come Through!
‘Her intensity and intimacy are engaging’ Blake Morrison, Guardian
‘A lovely, urgent, serious book' Tessa Hadley
‘Refreshing and unexpected’ Daisy Hay, Financial Times
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.
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.
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