Gillian Freeman

Gillian Freeman Librettist

Biography

Gillian Freeman was born on 5 December 1929. She attended Francis Holland School in London and Lynton House School in Maidenhead during the Second World War. She graduated in English and Philosophy from Reading University in 1951. She then taught at an East End school and worked as an editor and journalist. The Liberty Man (1955) was Gillian Freeman's first book, written while she was working as literary secretary to the novelist Louis Golding. One of her best-known books is The Leather Boys (1961), published under the pseudonym Eliot George, after the novelist George Eliot, the story of a homosexual relationship between two young working-class men.

Her essay The Undergrowth of Literature (1967) is a study of pornography. In 1978, she wrote a fictional diary, Nazi Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg, 1938-48. Gillian Freeman also wrote screenplays for the cinema (Robert Altman's That Cold Day in the Park, 1969) and for dance: she collaborated with choreographer Kenneth MacMillan on the ballets Isadora and Mayerling. With her husband Edward Thorpe, novelist and dance critic for the Evening Standard, she wrote Ballet Genius (1988), a series of portraits of dancers. She died on 23 February 2019.

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