Gillian Freeman

Gillian Freeman

Gillian Freeman (born 5 December 1929) is a British writer. Born to Jewish parents Dr. Jack Freeman and his wife Freda (née Davids) in North London, she graduated in English Language and Literature from the University of Reading in 1951. She married Edward Thorpe, novelist and ballet critic of the Evening Standard, in 1955. They have two daughters, the actresses Harriet Thorpe and Matilda Thorpe. One of her best known books was the 1961 novel The Leather Boys (published under the pseudonym Eliot George, a reference to the writer George Eliot), a story of a gay relationship between two young working-class men, 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, who wanted a story about a "Romeo and Romeo in the South London suburbs". Her non-fiction book The Undergrowth of Literature (1967), was a pioneering study of pornography. In 1979, 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 took it to be genuine. Her most recent book is But Nobody Lives in Bloomsbury (2006), a fictional study of the Bloomsbury Group.

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