Description

‘A lovely, urgent, serious book’ Tessa Hadley

‘Refreshing and unexpected’ Daisy Hay, Financial Times

Lara Feigel listens to birds outside her window – their circling, strident calls – and thinks of D. H. Lawrence. It is the spring of 2020 and, as the pandemic takes hold, she locks down in rural Oxfordshire with her partner, her two children, and that most explosive of writers.

Proceeding month by month through the year, she sets out to start again with Lawrence: to find vital literary companionship; to use him as a guide to rural living and even, unexpectedly, to child-rearing; to find a way through his writing to excavate the modern world she feels he helped bring into being. Tracing the arc of Lawrence’s life and delving deep into his writings, she confronts his anger, his passion, his tumultuous vitality. In the process, she faces some of today’s most urgent dilemmas, from secular religion to the climate crisis, from sex and sexuality to feminism’s ideas about motherhood. And, as she watches the seasons change alongside Lawrence, Feigel finds the rhythms of her own life shifting in unexpected ways.

Brilliantly interweaving literary criticism, biography and memoir, Look! We Have Come Through! is a captivating exhumation of an author and a compelling manifesto for exposing ourselves to difficult and dangerous views.

Publisher Review

PRAISE FOR LOOK! WE HAVE COME THROUGH!: 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 Feigel's 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 Feigel's writing so seductive is the way she seems to absorb Lawrence's 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. It's fertile ground, and Feigel a fine explorer. I really enjoyed this book -- Sara Wheeler * Spectator * Lara Feigel's 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 *