English writer (1929–2019)
Gillian Freeman (5 December 1929[1] – 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.
Early life
Born to Jewish parents, Dr Jack Freeman, a dentist who had been a physician, and his wife Freda (née Davids) in North London,[2] she attended Francis Holland School in London and Lynton House school in Maidenhead during the Second World War.[3] She graduated in English and philosophy from the University of Reading in 1951.[4] She then taught at a school in the East End and worked as a copywriter and a newspaper reporter.[4]
Career
The Liberty Man (1955) was Freeman's first book, written while working as a literary secretary to the novelist Louis Golding; it was about a love affair between a schoolteacher and a sailor doomed by the class system.[4][5] Freeman's time with Golding was said to have inspired some of her later works.[3]
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,[5] 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,[4] who wanted a story about a "Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs".[6][7] Her non-fiction book The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), was a pioneering study of pornography.[4][8]
The Alabaster Egg (1970) is a tragic romance about a Jewish woman set in Nazi Germany.[4] 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;[9] it was included in a 2004 anthology of war diaries.[4][10]
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,[5] and with her husband, Ballet Genius (1988), portraits of 20 outstanding ballet dancers.[4] Her final book[citation needed] was But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006), a fictional study of the Bloomsbury Group.[11]
Private life
Freeman married Edward Thorpe, a novelist and the ballet critic of the Evening Standard, in 1955.[2] The couple had two daughters, the actresses Harriet Thorpe and Matilda Thorpe.[4]
She died on 23 February 2019 from complications of dementia.[4][5]
