Kirjahaku

Custody is the first book for general readers on the history of child custody, an issue that affects so many lives and a question that seems fundamental to our experience and understanding of family. It is also an issue that has played a central, at times troubling role in the history of feminism. Lara Feigel’s book probes the relationship between emancipation and care via a range of fascinating (and also heartbreaking, surprising and enraging) custody cases 1800 to the present. This book is the story of eight women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Isabella Robinson, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Sharon Bottoms, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of marriage in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts. It’s written as a book of stories because mothers enter courtrooms as storied figures. In custody hearings, the most intimate aspects of our lives as women and mothers get driven into the public sphere, and are subject to public interpretation. Stories are told about us, and we respond with stories of our own; judges weigh these stories against each other and come up with stories called judgments, and then send us out into the world and tell us to cooperate with our traducer in the upbringing of a vulnerable child who fears precisely the strife that has just been whipped up by the court. Ultimately it’s a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet, and in the process argues that motherhood is the shameful secret of modernity, and custody the shameful secret at the heart of motherhood. And, because questions of power for women are questions of feminism, it’s a book about the tortuously ambivalent relationship between feminism and motherhood, and about feminism’s equivocating commitment to emancipation and care.

Custody is the first book for general readers on the history of child custody, an issue that affects so many lives and a question that seems fundamental to our experience and understanding of family.

This book tells the story of a generation of writers who were passionately engaged with politics and with cinema, exploring the rise and fall of a distinct tradition of cinematic literature. Dismayed by the rise of fascism in Europe and by the widening gulf separating the classes at home, these writers turned to cinema as a popular and hard-hitting art form. Lara Feigel crosses boundaries between high modernism and social realism and between 'high' and 'popular' culture, bringing together Virginia Woolf with W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen with John Sommerfield, Sergei Eisenstein with Gracie Fields. The book ends in the Second World War, an era when the bombs and searchlights rendered everyday life cinematic. Feigel interrogates the genres she maps, drawing on cultural theories from the 1920s onwards to investigate the nature of the cinematic and the literary. While it was not possible directly to transfer the techniques of the screen to the page any more than it was possible to 'go over' to the working classes, the attempts nonetheless reveal a fascinating intersection of the visual and the verbal, the political and the aesthetic. In reading between the frames of an unexplored literary tradition, this book redefines 1930s and wartime literature and politics. Key Features * Offers new interpretations of well-known texts and writers such as W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice, George Orwell and Virginia Woolf * Offers substantial readings of less well-known writers including working-class writers John Sommerfield and James Barke * Offers a new perspective on Spanish Civil War and Second World War writing

‘Her intensity and intimacy are engaging’ Blake Morrison, Guardian‘A lovely, urgent, serious book' Tessa Hadley‘Refreshing and unexpected’ Daisy Hay, Financial TimesBrilliantly 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.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.

‘A fascinating mix of literary criticism, cultural history and memoir … Highly enjoyable’ Sunday TimesHow might we live more freely, and will we be happier or lonelier if we do? Rereading The Golden Notebook in her thirties, Lara Feigel discovered that Doris Lessing spoke directly to her as a woman, writer and mother in a way that no other novelist had done. Veering between admiration and fury at the choices Lessing made, Feigel conducts a dazzling investigation into the joys and costs of sexual, psychological, intellectual and political freedom. The result is this genre-defying book: at once a meditation on life and literature and a daring act of self-exposure.

'A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women' Rachel CuskLara Feigel's first novel, The Group, is a fiercely intelligent, revealing novel about a group of female friends turning forty. Who has children and who doesn't? Whose marriages are working, whose aren't, and who has embarked on completely different models of sexuality and relationships? Who has managed to fulfil their promise, whose life has foundered and what do they think about it, either way? The Group is an engrossing portrait of contemporary female life and friendship, and a thrillingly intimate and acute take on female character in an age that may or may not have been changed by feminism in its different strands.

'A very funny and brilliant book. Feigel does a thorough and virtuosic job of describing the dilemmas of contemporary middle-class women' Rachel CuskThe five of them - Stella, Priss, Kay, Helena and Polly - met at university, their lives full of lazy afternoons and late nights. Friendship seemed simple and there was such pleasure in the endless talk and in just living alongside each other.Now the women are turning forty and they're finding that a shared past can sometimes be a burden. They're all struggling to navigate the ways in which their lives have differed from the plans they made themselves and the hopes they had for each other. In the past, solidarity came easily, but now they compare lovers, husbands, jobs, children and sofas, asking how the choices they've made or failed to make hold up. As marriages end and secrets emerge, they wonder whether these people, the ones who know so much about them, are really the ones they can confide in.

'An absorbing and heart-breaking study, opening a window into the past and urgently contemporary at the same time' TESSA HADLEY We think that our children belong to us, but families are fragile things. Every day, for over a century, children have been moved between homes because of law cases that decide their fates. Yet child custody is curiously absent from history books and from how we generally understand our world. Lara Feigel’s groundbreaking book shows the fraught, complex territory of child custody to have been one of the vital battlegrounds of modern history and culture. Custody is the story of seven women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of matrimony in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts. It’s a book of dramatic storytelling, and of blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation. Each chapter immerses the reader in the life and times – and struggles – of these fascinating, charismatic, complex women and their children. All of these women were mothers, but all of them wanted and needed to be other things too – writers, lovers, or activists – and they and their children were punished for these attempts. Feigel has been deep in the archives, looking into thousands of other cases in each place and time, and she’s been sitting in on the family courts in the present. So alongside these central figures, the book presents a teeming picture of fractured family life in Britain, Europe and North America across two hundred years, offering a major new interpretation of how our modern culture has evolved. And Custody is an alternative history of feminism, centring on the fraught relationship between emancipation and care. This book is of urgent interest to anyone concerned with women’s roles in the world and how institutions fail them. Ultimately it’s a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet. Custody cases can seem in these chapters to be quintessentially tragic, but the stories of these passionate, conflicted women also make us want to figure out how to do things better.

'A GREAT ROAR OF A BOOK' Sunday TimesWe think that our children belong to us, but families are fragile things.