Free Woman
Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing
1st Edition
Published on 8. March 2018
336 pages
978-1-4088-7855-2 (ISBN)
Description
'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.
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.
More details
Edition
1. Auflage
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
ISBN-13
978-1-4088-7855-2 (9781408878552)
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Schweitzer Classification
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03/2019
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
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03/2018
Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
€44.76
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Person
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.
larafeigel.com
@larafeigel
larafeigel.com
@larafeigel
Content
- Cover
- Praise for Free Woman
- A Note on the Author
- Dedication
- Title Page
- Contents
- 'I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can': Lessons from Lessing
- I Reading
- II Dangling
- 1 'This infinite exchange of earth and sky': The Bush
- I 'Every writer has a myth-country'
- II 'Because it is so empty we can dream'
- 2 'She was free. Free!': Womanhood
- I 'A drenching, saturating moment of illumination'?
- II 'A damned wedding ring'
- III 'The wound inside my body which I didn't choose to have'
- 3 'I'm setting you free': Escape
- I 'Do I love her?''
- II 'My baby, if you are interested, is entirely admirable'
- 4 'It was like a rebirth': Communism
- I 'Her eyes had been opened and her ears made to hear'
- II 'Only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible'
- IV 'I feel as if I've been let out of a prison'
- 5 'I cannot imagine myself not loving several people at once in various ways': Free Love
- I 'The free woman was so much more exciting than the dull tied woman'
- II 'Women must be as free as men to mould their own amatory life'
- III 'We don't have an orgasm unless we love him. What's free about that?'
- IV 'To make oneself passive is very different from being a passive object'
- 6 'It is potentially liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death': Madness
- I 'He rejoiced in his own madness, he was free'
- II 'Enclosed by these vivid dry colours'
- 7 'I was able to be freer than most because I am a writer': Writing
- I 'Me, I, this feeling of me'
- 8 'A sick sweet submersion in pain': The Dark
- I 'She has felt death in her throat'
- II 'I can't endure this desert'
- 9 'Full of restless stars'The Bush
- I 'They were her hills'
- II 'The jewel of Africa'
- III 'A high, dry, empty sky'
- Afterword
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
- Index
- Copyright Page
