Ruth Scurr
Free Woman: Life, Liberation and Doris Lessing
by Lara Feigel (Bloomsbury, £20)
After Doris Lessing’s death in 2013, Lara Feigel reread The Golden Notebook (1962). Her older friends had begun to reminisce about how it had changed their lives. When Feigel first read it as a student, it had left little impression, but in her mid-thirties it proved revolutionary. Free Woman tells Feigel’s story, blending literary criticism, biography and memoir: “this book emerged as an attempt to understand freedom as Lessing conceived it and as we might apprehend it now—politically, intellectually, emotionally and sexually.”