Free Woman: Life, Liberation, and Doris Lessing

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. (May)