Free Woman

January 15, 2018
Feigel (The Love-Charm of Bombs), a senior lecturer in English at King’s College London, weaves together two narratives: the life of acclaimed novelist Doris Lessing (1919–2013) and her own life story, both seen in terms of the search for personal freedom. Feigel is a fine writer and renders Lessing’s quest in riveting fashion. Her own story is more problematic, perhaps because she is in the middle of it, but it does provide an up-to-date counterpart to Lessing’s midcentury journey. Lessing sought freedom from middle-class constraints in various ways: by escaping her London house for the Zimbabwe bush of her childhood as often as possible, by abandoning her own young children, by supporting communism for a time, and by pursuing writing. Feigel paints Lessing’s suffering and courage convincingly. But, while she soars in writing about Lessing, conveying her own life proves more of a struggle for her. While an unadventurous life is no crime, Feigel’s attempts to learn from Lessing’s example only result, ironically, in small, safe moves, such as swimming nude, or in “so bourgeois an acquisition” as the summer home she and her husband purchase. Her concluding takeaway is not enlightening: that it is “childish” to seek personal freedom and that instead one should accept one’s lot in life. Readers who can get past the less-insightful memoir passages will enjoy the intelligent and well-expressed exploration of Lessing’s uncommon life. Agent: Tracy Bohan, Wylie Agency.

February 15, 2018
A writer discovers herself as she searches to understand Doris Lessing (1919-2013).In her mid-30s, married with a young son, Feigel (English/King's Coll., London; The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love, and Art in the Ruins of the Reich, 2016, etc.) became obsessed with the idea of freedom. A miscarriage strained her marriage, and as desperately as she wanted another child, she also felt conflicted about the inherent constraints of motherhood. Struggling to define the "existential feeling" of freedom and its consequences for a woman's life, Feigel turned to Lessing, for whom liberation was a pressing concern and recurring theme, mining her works and her life in an attempt "to understand freedom as Lessing conceived it and as we might apprehend it now, politically, intellectually, emotionally, and sexually." Thoroughly immersed in Lessing's work, Feigel decided that there seemed an "urgent and personal liberation to be found in pursuing Lessing herself: in hunting her down as a way of giving the side of me that identified with her the space and time it needed to emerge." Combining memoir, biography, and sensitive close readings of Lessing's fiction and autobiography, Feigel creates an unusually intimate exploration of the intertwining of Lessing's life with her own. As much as she admired Lessing, two facets of her life were problematic: her abandonment of her two young children, which Lessing saw as "a necessary condition" of her pursuit of freedom; and her continued membership in the Communist Party. Lessing's "love affair with communism," Feigel writes, "left me both envious and shocked": shocked by her attempts to defend Stalin; envious of the reckless excitement of a love affair as well as "her determination to be always complicated: to question everything--not only what those around her thought, but what she herself thought." Despite all of Lessing's "energy and talent," her life inevitably "narrowed" in ways she could not control, leading Feigel to redefine freedom for herself as a "surprisingly joyful knowledge of my own powerlessness."A graceful, absorbing meditation on two lives.

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