Esther Freud

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	Photo: © Christopher Baines

Biography

Novelist Esther Freud was born in London in 1963, the daughter of the artist Lucian Freud. She trained as an actress at the Drama Centre and has appeared in, and written for, various productions for both stage and television. She is also co-founder, with fellow actress and novelist Kitty Aldridge, of the women's theatre company 'Norfolk Broads'. Esther Freud was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Novelists 2' by Granta magazine in 1993.

Her debut novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), evokes the bohemian childhood of two young children accompanying their mother in her search for freedom and adventure in 1960s Morocco. The novel, which was shortlisted for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. Freud's second novel, Peerless Flats (1993), set in London in the 1970s, is centred around Lisa, a teenage drama student who lives in a block of flats with her mother and five-year-old brother.

Gaglow (1997), which was shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction, is told by an out-of-work actress as she is painted by her artist father, and interwoven with the story of her German ancestors and their estate at Gaglow. Themes of family, step-family and childhood are again at the heart of The Wild, published in 2000. The Sea House (2003), is a love story set in a seaside village in Suffolk.

Esther Freud lives in London and Southwold, Suffolk. Her most recent novel is Love Falls (2007).

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Fiction

Bibliography

Hideous Kinky   Hamish Hamilton, 1992

Peerless Flats   Hamish Hamilton, 1993

Gaglow   Hamish Hamilton, 1997

The Wild   Hamish Hamilton, 2000

The Sea House   Hamish Hamilton, 2003

Love Falls   Bloomsbury, 2007

Read about books by Esther Freud at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Esther Freud at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1992   Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Prize   (shortlist)   Hideous Kinky

1998   Jewish Quarterly Literary Prize for Fiction   (shortlist)   Gaglow

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Critical Perspective

Esther Freud has been called, in The Independent on Sunday, ‘the best writer about childhood we have’. Certainly, children and family relationships are what her highly absorbing novels are ‘about’, capturing the charm and passionate intensity of children’s psychology, as well as their insecurities and occasional terrors, with sympathetic insight. The narrator of her best-known and most humorous novel, Hideous Kinky (1992), is, for example, a precocious five-year-old girl, with a lightly satirical view of her hippy mother’s pretensions and love affairs, but she also suffers from underlying worries, having nightmares of ‘The Black Hand’. Freud’s novels mix their dark and light emotional colours well (the uncompromising artist figure often appears in them); they draw readers in, their stories engage with quirky characters and incidents. Psychological insights as well as bohemian artistic settings are what one might expect from an author belonging to the Freud dynasty, and indeed her work is somewhat ‘Freudian’. As well as children and family conflicts, they strongly feature sexuality, dreams, and houses as places of trauma and memory. By all accounts, she draws to some extent upon her own family’s experience of being German-Jewish exiles in England, in the family history scenarios of Gaglow (1997), and The Sea House (2003). Novelists that one might compare her to include Kate Atkinson and the late Bernice Rubens.  

Hideous Kinky is a wonderfully entertaining short novel about an extended stay in Morocco during the 1960s by a mother on the hippy trail with her two young daughters aged five and seven. What really makes it work is the child’s eye view; through her we register the squabbling closeness of her sister, and their mother’s quest for spiritual wisdoms (‘”Oh Mum, please” … I was prepared to beg. “Please don’t be a Sufi”’). The two girls become precociously aware of conflict in the adults around them, telling each other stories continually, and observing the differences between Western and Moroccan culture. They casually eat majoun, a lump of hashish made into a sweet, which tastes like ‘sand mixed with honey and fried in a vat of doughnuts’. Among numerous eccentric characters, we meet expatriate elderly ladies, Linda and her baby (who wage a losing battle against ‘the nappy thieves’), dancers, beggar girls, and a changing cast of unreliable male lovers. They are forced into a hand-to-mouth existence, and have anxieties about the absent father; then the girls themselves become separated. There is an authentic feel in conveying the attitudes of the 1960s, which is beguiling: the reader simply goes along with them on their journey of self-discovery.

Gaglow is structurally more complex and deeply felt, its parallel narratives of love and conflict taking place around the time of the First World War in Germany, and in contemporary England. The first is doom-laden, about the Belgard girls, daughters of a well-to-do Jewish grain merchant who, the opening paragraph informs us, ‘did not admire their mother’ but ‘adored’ their brother Emanuel. The relationships between sisters are again important, with the main focus on young Eva; her feelings for her brother are expressed in the fantasy world of letters when he goes off to fight on the Russian front. The family is broken up emotionally and financially by the war – and by increasing anti-Semitism. In the second narrative strand, pregnant Sarah is estranged from her actor boyfriend and, while waiting for the birth of ‘Sonny’, poses for her artist father. She becomes intrigued by the recovery of the family’s country house at Gaglow, in the former East Germany. She starts to dream of the house and her tragic relatives, especially her grandmother – the very same Eva - whom she most resembles. Interplay between the two narratives is well managed, and, in a couple of brief but poignant scenes, Sarah is taken to meet Eva, who is now old and senile. As Sarah ‘traces clues and legacies left by her ancestors, the novel grows into an enchantingly forgiving study of the difficulties of intimacy, rooted in pain’ [Patrick Gale]. But balancing the tragedy is Freud’s entertaining account of the foibles of modern love relationships, and the mutual utter absorption of Sarah and ‘Sonny’, as 'a great storm of love welled up between us'.

The Wild (2000) is her most disturbing novel. It opens with an act of violence and is an emotionally raw tale of conflict between children and adults. Nine-year-old Tess is the familiar child main character around whom the action revolves. We mainly get her viewpoint, observing her own, her mother’s and brother’s differing reactions when they go to stay at a house in the country with William Strachan, a handsome schoolteacher who has several daughters from a previous relationship. We can perhaps guess that Strachan will turn out to be a creep when he whispers to the infatuated mother ‘Just wait till you taste my ravioli’. Sex bubbles uncomfortably underneath the action throughout, especially when a 17-year-old girl (called ‘Perpetual Love’) arrives at the house, having been rescued from a cult. Tess and her brother make secret phone calls and visits to their writer father in London. Her anxieties are made manifest in bed-wetting, and the trauma caused by Strachan confronting her about it is indeed grim. Some of the ‘clues’ are perhaps too neat: for example, Strachan directs Oedipus as the school play (‘the modern version’), and bloodthirsty Norse myths are Tess’s favourite lessons, while her brother’s vicious cat is called Odin.

Freud’s The Sea House (2003) is no less emotionally fraught, but develops in a more stately middle-aged fashion. This time, although there are child characters and flashbacks to childhood, it mainly concerns adult traumas. The novel returns to German-Jewish exiles in England, and concerns the effects of war, and time, on individuals. As with Gaglow, its two narratives make interplays, moving between the past and present. In one, the exiled German artist Max Meyer arrives during the summer of 1953 in the Suffolk village of Steerborough, to paint pictures as therapy following the death of his sister. He is introduced to another exile, architect Klaus Lehmann, and the deaf and awkward Max becomes sexually involved with his wife. In the other, Lily has an unsatisfactory relationship with her career-driven boyfriend, and rents a cottage in the village for the summer to read Lehmann’s letters to his wife during the 1930s, feeling ‘a stab of envy’ for their lives. Lily herself has an affair, after meeting two children with their bohemian father. She moves into the sea house of the title, tracking down what has happened to them all, and their descendants. The climax takes place with the East Coast floods of 1953, and is emotionally absorbing. And Lily does, like any number of Esther Freud’s characters, resolve her feelings of being ‘like a misunderstood child’.

Dr Jules Smith, 2005

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Author statement

'Writing fiction, which is what I love to do, is like losing yourself in a secret world. I write every morning and if for some reason I am not able to get to my desk, I feel restless and uneasy. I used to be more impatient, always dreaming of the day when I'd finish a book, but as my life has become busier I value the slow unfolding of a novel that might take several years to write.'

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Bloomsbury Publishing plc 38 Soho Square London  W1D 3HB England Tel: +44 (0)20 7494 2111 Fax: +44 (0)20 7434 0151 E-mail: publicity@bloomsbury.com http://www.bloomsbury.com

Agent A. P. Watt Ltd 20 John Street London  WC1N 2DR England Tel: +44 (0)20 7405 6774 Fax: +44 (0)20 7831 2154 E-mail: apw@apwatt.co.uk http://www.apwatt.co.uk

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