Look! We Have Come Through!: Living With D. H. Lawrence

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Description

Lara Feigel listens to birds outside her window their circling, animated calls and thinks of D. H. Lawrence. It is the year 2020, and as the pandemic takes hold she locks down with her partner, her two children, and that most mercurial of writers. Proceeding month by month through the year, Lara sets out to reassess D. H. Lawrence; to use him as a guide to life; to find companionship; to help her make sense of this new, off-kilter world. Tracing the arc of Lawrences life and delving deep into his writings, she is exposed to his rage, his passion, his tumultuous vitality. And as she watches the season change alongside D.H. Lawrence, Lara finds the rhythms of her own life changing in new and unexpected ways. A dazzling blend of literary criticism, biography and memoir, Look! We Have Come Through! is a spellbinding excavation of an author, and a compelling manifesto for living bravely.

Reviews

To be able to meet the world unillusioned but undismayed is what Lawrence did for Lara Feigel, and it is what she hopes he can do for us as a result of her bracing and honest book. Each chapter homes in on a major topic and Feigel has something fresh to say in every case Some of the sharpest, shrewdest discussions I have seen of Lawrence for a long time. -- Paul Dean * The Critic *
Refreshing and unexpected The case for reading, and for thinking hard and seriously about the role of reading in a world characterised by fracture, is powerfully made. -- Daisy Hay * Financial Times *
A perceptive book a critical biography but also a pandemic memoir a story about how an author can inform and change your life Part of the attraction of the book is Feigels candour: the charting of her ups and downs as the seasons pass. If she werent so attuned to Lawrence, it would feel ickily self-absorbed. But she writes insightfully about his central themes, and though she torments herself unduly by taking his wackier theories too seriously, her intensity and intimacy are engaging. -- Blake Morrison * Guardian *
A lovely, urgent, serious book, making me think about Lawrence and life all over again. -- Tessa Hadley
Through an intimate engagement with a brilliant, ever-provocative writer, Lara Feigel navigates the pandemic and a storm-tossed year in her own life as woman and mother. By turns troubled, tender and bold, this absorbing book brings Lawrence's vivid talent and ideas close, testing them against the pressures of the contemporary. -- Lisa Appignanesi
Lara Feigel wrestles with Lawrence, resents him, adores him and even tries to learn from him, all while Covid rages; it makes for a daring and unconventional bibliomemoir that might change the way you feel about sex, motherhood, work, illness and faith. -- Samantha Ellis
A fiercely intelligent engagement with Lawrence, half memoir and half critical biography, in which Lara Feigel comes in at a series of oblique angles to reach some startling judgments. I was highly impressed. -- D. J. Taylor
Feigels Lawrence is an untimely, urgent teacher of life and its passions. Agile, surprising and compulsively absorbing, Look! We Have Come Through! is the perfect tonic for the cynical, jaded spirit of our time. -- Josh Cohen
Both an analysis of what makes Lawrence so troublingly intoxicating, and an account of what happens when we succumb to the writers we admire. Clear-headed, yet also strangely intuitive, what makes Lara Feigels writing so seductive is the way she seems to absorb Lawrences influence so deeply into herself that he becomes her own. -- Kate Kilalea
Praise for Free Woman: 'A fascinating mix of literary criticism, cultural history and memoir Highly enjoyable * Sunday Times *
An extraordinary meditation on what it means to be a clever, engaged woman A classical, precise use of language Most compelling Physically and intellectually intimate * Guardian *
The most intriguing and certainly the bravest work of literary scholarship I have ever read -- Deborah Levy
Ironic, beautiful and rather moving * Literary Review *
Free Woman is not a biography, but the same artistic process is at work: as a biographer, you think you are going to possess your subject, but they always end up possessing you. Its fertile ground, and Feigel a fine explorer. -- Sara Wheeler * Spectator *
Free Woman has taken on the formidable Doris for a new generation Feigel has the gift of converting complex thoughts into coherent sentences that delight * The Times *

Author Bio

Lara Feigel is a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at Kings College London. She is the author of four previous works of non-fiction: Literature, Cinema and Politics, 1930-1945 (2009), The Love-charm of Bombs (2013), The Bitter Taste of Victory (2016) and Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing (2018), as well as one novel, The Group (2020). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and writes regularly for the Guardian and other publications. Lara lives in Oxfordshire. www.larafeigel.com @larafeigel