Lara Feigel CUSTODY with Sophie Ratcliffe

Custody

Custody is the first book for general readers on the history of child custody, an issue that affects so many lives and a question that seems fundamental to our experience and understanding of family. It's also an act of dramatic storytelling, blistering polemic and large-scale historical re-evaluation.

It is also an issue that has played a central, at times troubling role in the history of feminism. Custody probes the relationship between emancipation and care through a range of fascinating (and also heartbreaking, surprising and enraging) custody cases 1800 to the present in England, France and America.

This book is the story of seven women - Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O'Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears - who have fought for their children and been found wanting. It is also the story of the children who have lost the care they most need because divorce is at heart a macabre continuation of marriage in a new setting, with the battles of the marriage stoked into new levels of acrimony by the courts.

It's written as a book of stories because mothers enter courtrooms as storied figures. In custody hearings, the most intimate aspects of our lives as women and mothers get driven into the public sphere and are subject to public interpretation. Stories are told about us, and we respond with stories of our own; judges weigh these stories against each other and come up with stories called judgments, and then send us out into the world and tell us to cooperate with our opponent in the upbringing of a vulnerable child who fears precisely the strife that has just been whipped up by the court.

Ultimately it's a book that sees custody as the nexus where motherhood, ideology and power meet.

Lara Feigel

Lara Feigel is a writer and cultural historian and a Professor in the English department at King’s College London. She is fascinated by the relationship between life, literature and history and in her books attempts to find new ways of writing that can allow the three to intertwine. Her latest book is Custody: The Secret History of Mothers, which tells the 200 year history of child custody through the stories of seven women – Caroline Norton, George Sand, Elizabeth Packard, Frieda Lawrence, Edna O’Brien, Alice Walker, Britney Spears – who have fought for their children and been found wanting.

Sophie Ratcliffe

Sophie Ratcliffe is professor of literature and creative criticism at the University of Oxford and a fellow and tutor at Lady Margaret Hall. In addition to her scholarly books, including On Sympathy, she has published commentary pieces and book reviews for the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Times Literary Supplement, among other outlets, and has served a judge for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction and the Wellcome Book Prize