Nancy Freedman

Nancy Mars Freedman (born July 4, 1920, in Evanston, Illinois, died August 10, 2010, in Greenbrae, California) was an American feminist novelist, the co-author of Mrs. Mike.^[1]

Freedman (née Nancy Mars) was a professional child actress for touring stage plays, and she met her husband Benedict Freedman in 1940 in Hollywood, where he was working as a writer and she was trying to break into movies. They married in 1940 despite her poor health, which began with a bout of rheumatic fever at age three and lasted her entire life.^[1]

She began writing novels with her husband in 1947 with Mrs. Mike, the fictionalized story of their friend Katherine Mary Flannigan who married a Mountie and moved from Boston to the Canadian wilderness. It became a bestseller and inspired a 1950 film adaptation. The two Freedmans wrote nine more novels together,^[2] and Freedman wrote several more by herself. Her later works, including Mary, Mary Quite Contrary (1968) and Sappho: The Tenth Muse (1998) have been called "ardently feminist."^[1]

Freedman's son, Michael Freedman, became a noted mathematician, and her two daughters also work in academia as a musician at the University of California, Berkeley and as the director of the medical humanities program at the University of California, Irvine.^[2]

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