Author(s): Lara Feigel

Literature

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.

Review: 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 Feigel's candour: the charting of her ups and downs as the seasons pass. If she weren't 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

Author Biography: Lara Feigel is a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King's 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