The Alabaster Egg

by Gillian Freeman

Book by Freeman, Gillian

173 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1970

About the author

Born in London, daughter of Dr. Jack Freeman and his wife, 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. 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.

Reviews

[Nicholas George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hannah is a young Jewish girl coming of age in prewar Nazi Germany. Uh-oh, right? Because her family (and social circle) mostly is non-Jewish, she gains entry to a social circle that includes many among the Nazi elite. She ultimately survives the Holocaust, and tells her story years later, sparked by reading a long lost diary of the male lover of Germany's King Leopold, which provides something of a counterpoint. It is all well-written but somewhat predictable and a tad ho-hum.