Born in Maida Vale, London[2] to Jewish parents, Dr Jack Freeman, a dentist who had been a physician, and his wife Freda (née Davids),[3] she attended Francis Holland School in London and Lynton House school in Maidenhead during the Second World War.
[5] 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] 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,[6] which was later turned into a film for which she wrote the screenplay, this time under her own name.
[5][9] The Alabaster Egg (1970) is a tragic romance about a Jewish woman set in Nazi Germany.
Freeman's authorship was not at first revealed and many readers assumed it was genuine;[10] it was included in a 2004 anthology of war diaries.