Free Woman : a Genre-defying book
Lara Feigel, an academic at King’s College, London asked two of her friends at the dance floor fill up, after reading Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, the 1962 feminist novel about mid-century women’s attempts to live freely and about the artistic and sexual life of Anna Wulf, a character whose experiences mirror many of Lessing’s own. For Feigel, the subjects become inseparable, as she too is married with a young son trying to conceive a second child, but simultaneously experiencing a midlife crisis which prompts her to question the assumptions and expectations surrounding female experiences. She is of the opinion that freedom might be found by following a model set out nearly six decades ago by trying to love other people, dabble in psychoanalysis, taking part in political marches, travel, walk, write, swim and even contemplate taking drugs. After a miscarriage Feigel plunges into a disequilibrium a feeling that her life and her marriage had lost that narrative of progress to which she attracted since her teens. She turns to Lessing’s more radical life and works in search of a different model of living.
As part of her search takes her to Dartmoor and Suffolk to Los Angeles in search of Lessing’s former lover Clancy Sigal and to Zimbabwe in search of the vast landscape that moulded the young Lessing.
The most important lesson from writings of Doris Lessing, Free Woman is how little has changed in 50 years, how women are still obliged to negotiate and define our role as lovers, wives, mothers, artists to keep reclaiming our liberty from definitions that seek to contain us.
How might we live more freely, and will we be happier or lonelier if we do? Feigel was enticed by Lessing’s vision of freedom, as she scrutinises her motherhood, marriage, and sexual relationships with an unusually acute gaze. This is a genre-defying book, revealing a daring act of self-exposure, and a meditation on life and literature.
Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing by Lara Feigel, Bloomsbury £20, 336 pages.