Lara Feigel Interviewed by Margie Orford

Literary critic and cultural historian Dr Lara Feigel explains how her intense exploration of the life and works of Doris Lessing was sparked by the realisation that the author captured perfectly her experiences as a writer, woman and mother.

Feigel’s book on Lessing is part personal memoir, part biography and part literary criticism. She says that at a time when she was dissatisfied with the constraints she felt she and her generation blindly accepted, Lessing offered an enticing vision of freedom.

Feigel is a senior lecturer in English at King’s College London specialising in the 1930s and the Second World War. She is also author of The Bitter Taste of Victory: Life, Love and Art in the Ruins of the Reich, and reviews for the Guardian and Observer.

Here she talks to journalist and crime fiction writer Margie Orford.

This event is part of a series on women in society sponsored by HSBC.

Biography & Memoir