A reader in modern literature and culture at King’s College London, Feigel has something of Lessing’s diligent energy on the page, and in Free Woman she succeeds in making an extraordinary meditation on what it means to be a clever, engaged woman two generations after Lessing ... Feigel acknowledges that the freedom she desires and expects is less about freedom from servitude or want than about freedom to do as you please and exist outside categories of attachment, and hence is predicated on advantages of class, race and money. The reason this privilege does not sink the book is because she approaches her reordering of life around the precepts of Lessing and her protagonists with such focused earnestness, and with a classical, precise use of language ... Her technique is scrupulous, sparing neither herself nor others in a chronicle that is physically and intellectually intimate, in the manner of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in The Confessions ... Feigel has thought seriously about the meaning of freedom ... Her quest in Free Woman to do things differently is too sincere to be self-indulgent.
Hers is a quest narrative, exploring ideas about freedom that she finds in Lessing’s biography and work—how, and at what cost, it might be found, sexually, politically, socially, intellectually, in passionate love, or alone in nature—and weaving them into an account of her doubts and concerns about the course of her own life and marriage ... Feigel is an attentive reader, but the slightly riskier part of her venture is its demand that attention be paid to the inner workings of her life, a life that is extraordinary only in its advantages. In the course of writing the book, she becomes aware that the sense of unfreedom she chafes at may have more to do with her own oppressive 'eagerness to please' ... Feigel’s goal is to describe her feelings and discoveries in as much detail as possible.
Like recent literary memoirs such as Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch and Bee Rowlatt’s In Search of Mary: The Mother of All Journeys, Feigel examines Lessing primarily through her own experiences, an approach that introduces Lessing to a new audience and dulls her edge. The genre of the 'bibliomemoir' has grown in recent years, in part because its combination of close readings and contemporary inquiry often leads to new and lively interpretations of classic works. (Though just as often, this gives the impression that books only have literary value when the situations they describe closely match those of the memoirist’s own life.) Feigel reads thoroughly and carefully ... More than Lessing’s adventures, what comes across most strongly in the book is Feigel’s sensitivity and thoughtfulness. She seems disappointed that she could not live the life that Lessing led and that she does not even want it.
Fuelling the book is a sense of naive anger at the fact that modern womanhood is not what was promised. But there are only so many permutations in a life: coupledom or not, children or not — and they all entail loss ... Where the book is most interesting is in the moments it attempts a reckoning with the inheritance of the 1960s. Lessing’s freedoms were won against a society that expected her to stay at home with her husband and children. There are no such expectations of Feigel. What does the freedom to live non-monogamously look like in a society that doesn’t even require marriage? When marijuana is legal in several states across the US and micro-dosing LSD is a middle-class hobby, what does the freedom to 'turn on, tune in and drop out' mean? ... In Free Woman we have not got much closer to an unencumbered womanhood, nor what in the end we might want from it.
It’s no coincidence that her most intense scrutiny is concentrated on Lessing’s personal relationships; her writing leaps to life in the chapters where Feigel is examining Lessing’s attitudes to sex, marriage and motherhood, and how she might redefine her own in their light, as she and her husband discuss the possibility of divorce.
Feigel’s clear-eyed self-examination includes an acknowledgment that she is describing what might fall under the mocking banner of first world problems ... There are no easy answers, either in life or in the writings of Doris Lessing. Perhaps the most insistent lesson from Free Woman is how little has changed in 50 years, how women are still obliged to negotiate and define our role as lovers, wives, mothers, artists, to keep reclaiming our liberty from definitions that seek to contain us. Free Woman is a valuable and brave contribution to a discussion that shows no sign of resolution – and perhaps this continuous sense of reinvention is part of what freedom means.
Part of me wishes Feigel had devoted less space to Lessing the woman, and more space to Lessing the writer. How did she learn the intellectual freedom she needed to write? Once learned, how did she sustain it? On freedom as a woman, though, Feigel is exceptional. This is just as true when she writes about Doris Lessing, or her characters, as when she writes about herself. She embodies Lessing's 'determination to always be complicated: to question everything — not only what those around her thought, but what she herself thought.' Critical memoir can do this better than any other form. Free Woman is worth reading as a piece of complicated thought, and one that's funny and sexy and frank, to boot. And if you haven't read The Golden Notebook, don't worry. I promise, you'll go buy a copy the moment you're done.
Feigel is a fine writer and renders Lessing’s quest in riveting fashion ... 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.
Combining memoir, biography, and sensitive close readings of Lessing’s fiction and autobiography, Feigel creates an unusually intimate exploration of the intertwining of Lessing’s life with her own ... A graceful, absorbing meditation on two lives.
