Custody, Care and Writing: Professor Lara Feigel in Conversation with Professor David Dwan

Custody, Care and Writing:

Professor Lara Feigel in Conversation with Professor David Dwan

Weinrebe Lecture

How do you connect life-writing with the largest issues of ethics and cultural history?

Professor Lara Feigel’s Custody: A Secret History of Motherhood (2026) is a groundbreaking study of an often overlooked but vital feature of the modern world. It is also a blisteringly original work of biographical imagination and large-scale historical argument. Custody tells the story of seven women—Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, and Britney Spears—who fought for their children and were found wanting. Through these case studies, it unpacks the embattled and often tortuous meanings of motherhood, parenthood, and care in modern culture.

What does it mean for a family to find itself defined by the legal system?

In this exciting event, Lara joins esteemed literary scholar Professor David Dwan to discuss not just custody past and present, but also how to write about women’s and children’s lives past and present, and some of the most vital questions around what caring for others even is within the family and the modern institutional world.

How and why is custody central to the history of the realist novel?

This conversation will appeal to readers and writers of life-writing, and to anyone interested in motherhood, care, family, feminism, and how institutions shape our understanding of family life. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

Speaker Details:

Professor Lara Feigel is Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and the author of five highly acclaimed works of cultural history, including The Love Charm of Bombs (2013), Free Woman (2018), and Look! We Have Come Through (2022), and the novel The Group (2020). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, reviews regularly for The Guardian and contributes to a range of BBC radio programmes. Her latest book is Custody: The Secret History of Mothers (2026).

Professor David Dwan is Professor of English Literature and Intellectual History at the University of Oxford.  His work focuses on the links between modern literature and its wider intellectual contexts, particularly moral and political thought. He is the author of Liberty, Equality and Humbug: Orwell’s Political Ideals (2018) and several essays on literary-philosophical themes in Yeats, Woolf, Conrad, Murdoch and others. The Good Life and Other Fictions (2027)—a study of the ways in which literary fiction can help us understand the broader role of fictiveness in our lives—will be published by Princeton University Press in January.

Further Details and Contacts:

Join us after the event for a wine reception and book sale by Caper.

This event is free and open to all. If you are able, please consider donating £5, £10, £20, or more to support OCLW’s free events, outreach activities, and programmes, helping us to keep life-writing open to all.

Donations can be made when booking your place or via our online donations portal. Every gift makes a difference. No one will be turned away for lack of funds.

Registration is recommended. Registration will close at 14:30 on 20/10/2026.

This is an in-person event. The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.

Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.