Look! We Have Come Through!

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 with her partner, her two children, and that most mercurial of writers. Proceeding month by month through the year, Feigel sets out to reassess D.H. Lawrence: to find urgent literary companionship; to use him as a guide to rural living and an unexpected (and sometimes rage-inducing) guide 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 climate crisis to secular religion to contemporary sexuality and feminism's ideas about motherhood. And as she watches the season change alongside Lawrence, Feigel finds the rhythms of her own life changing in unexpected ways. A dazzling blend of literary criticism, biography and memoir, Look! We Have Come Through! is a spellbinding exhumation of an author, and a compelling manifesto for exposing ourselves to difficult and dangerous views.