Flitting from flower to flower

‘I am interested only in stretching myself, in living as fully as I can.’ Lara Feigel begins her thoughtful book with this assertion by Anna Wulf, the protagonist of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, and it rather sums up the whole endeavour of the volume. Feigel weaves close readings of Lessing’s prose, both fiction and non-fiction, with accounts of her own self-stretching.

Feigel, an academic, had read Lessing as an undergraduate, but, returning to her in her thirties, she discovered in the books a stimulating discussion about ‘how as a woman to reconcile your need to be desired by men with your wish for sexual equality’. She is particularly interested in the way Lessing ‘placed sexual fulfilment at the centre of women’s lives’.

There are big questions here. Lessing, says Feigel, ‘had allowed me to see my own sense of the inextricable nature of body and mind, of the personal and political, as the basis for thinking about life’. She follows Lessing geographically — to Zimbabwe, for example — and in her pursuits, including ‘brushes with adultery’ and psychoanalysis. (Ronnie Laing naturally steps on stage.) In Los Angeles, Feigel interviews Clancy Sigal, with whom Lessing had a serious love affair. He once said, ‘compared to her writing, cooking was her real genius’. Philip Glass, with whom Lessing worked and on whom she had an unrequited crush, refuses to meet the author. So she goes to hear one of his operas instead.

Feigel ranges over the prose, the letters and diaries (many in a Sussex archive), and the life of her prey. Descriptions of the farm in the Banket District of the maize-growing region of Lomagundi where Lessing grew up in what was then Southern Rhodesia are wonderfully evocative.