An intense exploration of the life and works of Doris Lessing, and how their themes are reflected in the writer's own life
This is a memoir that begins at a wedding and ends in the African bush. It is an account of a writer co-opting a dead novelist into an obsessive, ambivalent relationship in order to learn from her about how to live.
Rereading The Golden Notebook in her mid-thirties, shortly after Doris Lessing 's death, Lara Feigel discovered that Lessing was a writer who spoke directly to her about her experiences as a woman, writer and mother in a way that no other novelist had done. At a time when she was dissatisfied with the constraints that she felt she and her generation seemed blindly to accept, Feigel was enticed in particular by Lessing 's vision of freedom.
Part memoir, part biography and part literary criticism, Free Woman is an examination of Lessing 's life and work structured as a series of nine investigations of sexual, psychological, intellectual and political freedom. Wonderfully incisive writing, elegantly exploratory and revelatory, is combined with a delicate sensitivity to relationships both real and in literature, in times of great stress, to mesmerising effect.
