Esther Freud — my favourite three books

Times

07-07-2025

Esther Freud, 62, was born in London, the daughter of the painter Lucian Freud and the great-granddaughter of the psychologist Sigmund Freud. After travelling the world with her mother, she returned to England in 1979, where she trained as an actress, appearing in The Bill and Doctor Who. She later became an author, best known for her 1992 semi-autobiographical novel Hideous Kinky. It recounts her unconventional childhood and was made into a film starring Kate Winslet. After writing her second novel, Peerless Flats, she was included in Granta's 1993 list of the best young British novelists. She has since written seven novels, including The Sea House and I Couldn't Love You More, and a play, Stitchers, that ran at the Jermyn Street Theatre in London in 2018. Her latest novel is My Sister and Other Lovers, a sequel to Hideous Kinky.
In her 1995 novel The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald tells the story of the young and brilliant Friedrich 'Fritz' von Hardenberg, a master of dialectics and mathematics who becomes the great romantic poet and philosopher Novalis. Fitzgerald throws us headlong into the world of Leipzig in the 18th century and beguiles us with the wit and delicacy of her storytelling. The novel is surprising, eccentric and moving, and with a humour that is all her own it touches upon the illogicality of love and the irrationality of genius. To me it seemed to show that books are the best place to learn about life — both past and present — and proved how modern a historical novel could be.
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A book that holds more stories than most is Michael Holroyd's A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving and Their Remarkable Families (2008). It is a masterwork of biography, unravelling one life after another, illuminating the passions and triumphs of the Victorian stage and, later, the artistic and sexual adventures of the ensuing generations. Holroyd adds layer upon layer to his multi-character tale, full of affection for each of them and the chaotic nature of their lives. The marriages, the affairs and divorces, the children, cherished, abandoned, a great many of them the offspring of Terry's son, the set designer Edward Gordon Craig, one of whose children is born — with tragic consequences — to the dancer Isadora Duncan. This book is as engrossing and fantastical as any novel and reveals the single-minded self-involvement that can sweep up a great artist.
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I have always loved Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys. It's not that Rhys is so very underrated, but her late novel Wide Sargasso Sea has overshadowed her earlier, more autobiographical books. I picked up my copy on a market stall just as I was beginning to write my first novel, and I have kept that copy in my study ever since as a talisman, a mark of what I most want to achieve. Voyage in the Dark (1934) tells the story of Anna, recently arrived from Dominica, working as an actress, touring the chillier, drabber seaside towns of Britain. It is written with spare elegance, the humour of the dialogue exquisite, and we are shown through Anna's dreamy, shivery reflections of West Indian life what this move from home has cost her. It's a story of belonging, of rootlessness, of prejudice, Anna's adventures fuelled by the hope that love might be the one thing that can save her.
My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud is out now (Bloomsbury £18.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members