[1] Figes wrote novels, literary criticism, studies of feminism, and vivid memoirs relating to her Berlin childhood and later experiences as a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Germany.

He was later released after his wife offered the Nazis a large bribe and managed to escape to England to join his family in London.

[1] She met the German author Günter Grass in London and the two had a short romantic affair that turned into a lifelong friendship.

[8] Figes's best known work is Patriarchal Attitudes, a feminist polemic written in 1970, published one month before Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.

The book argued that nurture rather than nature has shaped all secondary sex characteristics and considered why prominent female figures of the nineteenth century were ambivalent or hostile towards the feminist movement.