Product Code Database
Gillian Freeman (5 December 1929 International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2004, Routledge, p. 187. – 23 February 2019) was an English writer. Her first book, The Liberty Man, appeared while she was working as a secretary to the novelist Louis Golding. Her fictional diary, Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg, 1938–48, was assumed by many to be real.
One of her best known books was the novel The Leather Boys (1961), published under the pseudonym Eliot George, after the novelist George Eliot, a story of a gay relationship between two young working-class men, one married and the other a biker, which was later turned into a film for which she wrote the screenplay, this time under her own name. The novel was commissioned by the publisher Anthony Blond, her literary agent, who wanted a story about a "Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs". "Gillian Freeman, author whose flair for detail shone through in historical novels and in a 'Romeo and Romeo' love story – obituary", The Telegraph, 4 March 2019.Martin Foreman, Review of The Leather Boys (Gillian Freeman) (1986), archived at the Wayback Machine on 2 February 1999. Her non-fiction book The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), was a pioneering study of pornography.Victor E. Neuburg, The Popular Press Companion to Popular Literature, Popular Press, 1983, , p. 97.
The Alabaster Egg (1970) is a tragic romance about a Jewish woman set in Nazi Germany. In 1978, on another commission from Blond, she wrote a fictional diary, Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg, 1938–48. Freeman's authorship was not at first revealed and many readers assumed it was genuine;Anthony Blond, 'Glory Boys', The Sunday Times, 13 June 2004. it was included in a 2004 anthology of war diaries.Joel Rickett, "The Bookseller ", The Guardian, 11 December 2004.
In addition to novels, Freeman wrote screenplays including That Cold Day in the Park, a 1969 film directed by Robert Altman, the scenarios for two ballets by Kenneth MacMillan, Isadora and Mayerling, and with her husband, Ballet Genius (1988), portraits of 20 outstanding ballet dancers. Her final book was But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006), a fictional study of the Bloomsbury Group.Bethany Layne, "'They Leave out the Person to Whom Things Happened': Re-Reading the Biographical Subject in Sigrid Nunez's Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury (1998)", in: Bloomsbury Influences: Papers from the Bloomsbury Adaptations Conference, Bath Spa University, 5–6 May 2011, ed. E.H. Wright, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2014, , pp. 30–45, p. 41.
She died in London at the Whittington Hospital on 23 February 2019 from complications of dementia.Neil Genzlinger, "Gillian Freeman, Groundbreaking Novelist on a Gay Theme, Dies at 89", The New York Times, 8 March 2019.
Private life
Freeman married Edward Thorpe, a novelist and the ballet critic of the Evening Standard, in 1955. The couple had two daughters, the actresses Harriet Thorpe and Matilda Thorpe.
Works
External links
Categories: 1929 Births, 2019 Deaths, Alumni Of The University Of Reading, Pseudonymous Women Writers, British Historical Fiction Writers, 20th-century English Women Writers, 21st-century English Women Writers, English Women Novelists, 20th-century English Novelists, 21st-century English Novelists, Jewish English Writers, English Non-fiction Writers, Deaths From Dementia In England, 20th-century Pseudonymous Writers, 21st-century Pseudonymous Writers, People Educated At Francis Holland School, People From Maida Vale, Writers From The City Of Westminster
|
|
