Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing - Lara Feigel

© Doris Lessing, New Statesmen

In essence, Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing encapsulates the influence that our favourite books can wield over our lives; how particular authors can help us re-configure our ways of being during complicated emotions or painful experiences.

In this instance, the reader - Lara Feigel - specialises in Modern Literature and Culture at Kings College London and the writer is Doris Lessing, a highly acclaimed fiction writer from Rhodesia.

Feigel’s previous two published works - The Love-charm of Bombs (2013) and The Bitter Taste of Victory (2016) - fall within the expected realms of academic exploration. However, Free Woman traverses new formal boundaries because she mingles autobiographical memoir with literary analysis and biography.

Feigel introduces her third publication by describing how, during a particularly wedding-heavy summer, she began reading The Golden Notebook for the second time. However, whilst she found ‘Lessing’s heroine [to be] unnecessarily lugubrious’ aged nineteen, Feigel explains how the novel (and its theme of fragmentation) immediately captivated her now she was in her mid-thirties because she found Lessing to be “a writer who wrote about the lives of grown-up women with an honesty and fullness I had not found in any novelist before or since.”

Following this re-introduction, Lessing almost seems to take over as role model during the two years of self-reflective writing during which Feigel constructed Free Women. That is, Feigel ‘wanted to learn from her how to stand in the bush, looking up at the sky and to liberate myself from the conflicting desires that stopped me being free’.

As the book develops, we are led through a range of interlocking autobiographical cornerstones – marriage, love, childbirth, childhood, friendship, work – whilst Feigel looks to Lessing as a barometer for how she, and other women, might respond to certain restrictions that crowd adult life.

You can’t help but read into Feigel’s autobiographical musings a strong craving for flirtation with a riskier and more serendipitous way of being, in the hope that this may bring her closer to the sexual and intellectual freedoms she felt before marriage.

Nevertheless, a privileged white woman with a clearly defined place in London’s liberal metropolitan elite, is Feigel’s obsession with ‘freedom’ a touch out of place? Are her middle-class quandaries (to buy a second home, or to not buy a second home…) absent-minded in the face of broader social issues?

Luckily, Feigel is wholly aware of these potential criticisms and reveals that she made the authorial decision to broadcast even her most embarrassing, shameful or privileged feelings and concerns because ‘it was necessary to expose my least likeable, weakest self in the service of freedom’.

In continuation of this idea, Feigel tells us that many of her friends, after reading early transcriptions of the text, expressed reservations about some of the autobiographical content in the hope to protect her from appearing conceited, ignorant or petty. In response, Feigel contemplates whether ‘they’d have felt this anxious if I was a man’ – drawing the readers attention to our social reality where women are quickly vilified when open and honest about their flaws and deficiencies. Therefore, rather than appearing out-of-touch, Feigel’s autobiographical narrative - entwined alongside her analysis of Doris Lessing's works - emerges as a powerful political statement of feminist intent.

This unabashedly open and shameless memoir style seems particularly relevant in the current publishing world and is reflected in recent bestsellers such as Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts, Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love and Olivia Laing’s Lonely City. It seems that there is an audience for frank discussions about women’s personal lives that is becomingly increasingly political whilst also clearing a path for new formal literary boundaries.

A pioneer in her desire to seek out freedom in womanhood over the course of her long and eventful life (1919-2013), Doris Lessing’s most famous – and controversial - autobiographical event - leaving her children and first husband in search of ‘freedom’ - is, of course, addressed in Free Woman.

Feigel’s (partial) sympathy for Lessing’s decision seems to be rooted in her own pique at heteronormative societal expectations from a feminist perspective. It is, after all, women who largely shoulder the burdens associated with maintaining the heterosexual nuclear family. Perhaps this is why Fiegel expresses a shared sense of regret, with Lessing, for the speed with which ‘I joined my contemporaries in lining up so eagerly at the alter’.

Overall, it seems important that Feigel resists joining the dots or squaring the edges of the two-year period of her life during which she looked to Lessing for personal, intellectual and political guidance; in other words, the cloudiness of losing her sense of equilibrium is not straightened out by the power of hindsight.

Nor does Feigel make any overpowering attempt to define what it means to be a ‘Free Woman’; but waxes on this overarching idea in an inclusive manner that is reflective of the difficulties and joys embedded in the cycle of complex decisions and liberating experiences which define our adult lives.

© Bloomsbury Publishing