Custody The Secret History Of Mothers – Lara Feigel (1)

[19] For both this was happiness, wrested against all the odds; happiness conditional on the unhappiness of others and for Frieda contingent still on not losing her children, but happiness nonetheless. In a letter to his publisher Edward Garnett, Lawrence described ‘F, in a scarlet pinafore, leaning out on the balcony, against a background of blue and snowy mountains’, saying to him: ‘I’m so happy I don’t even want to kiss you.’

Lawrence characteristically turned from reverie to didacticism: ‘So there, you see, Love is a much bigger thing than passion, and a woman much more than sex.’ Garnett’s son David came to visit and fell half in love with Frieda, admiring her ‘noble’ head and green eyes, her habit of looking people ‘dead in the eyes’, fearless in her judgement, ‘extraordinarily like a lioness’.

She had cast off one life for another and was larger, fiercer, than she’d believed possible. [20] The letters came in, from Ernest and from her parents. Two things were becoming clear, and they brought a tragic inevitability to her continued separation from her children. Ernest was not prepared to give up the children he now saw wholly as his. And Lawrence was not prepared to fight Ernest in court: When you got to London, and had to face that judge, it would make you ill. We are not callous enough to stand against the public, the whole mass of the world’s disapprobation, in a sort of criminal dock.

It destroys us, though we deny it. We are all off the balance. We are like spring scales that have been knocked about. We had better be still awhile, let ourselves come to rest. [21] What of the children, left behind, their lives parcelled out by their parents? They all wrote about Lawrence and Frieda in later years. They didn’t dwell on these months of limbo, which remained only as shadowy, unhappy memories, but the atmosphere of this time emerges.

When his mother disappeared, Monty was left living alone with his father. His main memory of this time was of stomach cramps and nausea – he hardly ate. Barby and Elsa were contented at first with their grandparents, but then became confused about why their mother was taking so long. She’d only left them in Hampstead for a few weeks yet here they still were, overhearing hushed conversations about their poor father and their wanton mother.

Then Ernest sold the Nottingham house and moved Monty in with his parents too. Abruptly, all the children were told to address their Aunt Maude as ‘Mama’. ‘Where is Mama?’

Macken House, 39/40 Mayor Street Upper, Dublin 1, D01 C9W8, Ireland First published in Great Britain in 2026 by William Collins Copyright © 2026 Lara Feigel Lara Feigel asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Cover images © Shutterstock Quotations from Sylvia Plath reprinted with permission of Faber; extracts from A Rose in the Heart; Country Girl; The Lonely Girl; Girls in their Married Bliss and Time and Tide by Edna O’Brien reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop on behalf of the Estate of Edna O’Brien; quotations from Carlo Gébler reprinted with permission of Little Brown; quotations from Britney Spears reprinted with permission of Gallery Books, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

from The Woman In Me by Britney Spears. Copyright © 2023 by Britney Jean Spears. All Rights reserved; quotations from Alice Walker reprinted with permission of Joy Harris Literary Agency; quotations from Rebecca Walker reprinted with permission of 3 Arts Entertainment Every effort has been made to credit material used in this book to contact the respective copyright holder for permission. If your material has not been credited, please contact us and we will update in future editions. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e- book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down- loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Without limiting the exclusive rights of any author, contributor or the publisher of this publication, any unauthorised use of this publication to train generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies is expressly prohibited.

HarperCollins also exercise their rights under Article 4(3) of the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790 and expressly reserve this publication from the text and data mining exception.

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: b102dd1114bce379
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 30,727,990 bytes (29.304 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• ISBN: 9780008836818, 9780008655471
• Pages: 406
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 704.37 minutes
• Total Words: 140,874
• Total Characters: 814,956
• Average Words per Page: 346.98
• Average Characters per Page: 2007.28

Most Frequent Words

children (760), mother (634), custody (378), father (353), court (286), women (265), life (257), one (251), now (248), sand (244), child (239), love (232), new (227), woman (216), mothers (205), george (203), time (200), see (198), herself (194), she’d (185), wrote (183), like (182), alice (181), made (171), husband (168), daughter (167), even (167), it’s (165), years (162), divorce (156), didn’t (156), caroline (155), home (154), case (154), walker (153), away (152), though (151), world (150), son (149), first (147), man (147), law (145), rights (143), frieda (141), back (141), packard (136), much (136), family (136), marriage (134), house (132), parents (129), elizabeth (128), she’s (127), lawrence (125), day (125), men (125), found (122), care (122), ernest (121), two (120), told (120), way (119), rebecca (116), make (114), edna (113), also (112), between (112), wife (112), right (110), later (109), without (107), still (107), motherhood (105), going (103), wanted (103), little (101), he’d (101), always (100), book (98), solange (98), judge (97), good (96), took (96), find (95), read (94), legal (92), felt (92), around (92), girl (91), said (91), mother’s (91), writing (91), norton (90), well (89), kind (89), take (87), became (87), another (87), wasn’t (87), went (87).

PDF Download