Kathleen Freeman was born in Yardley, Birmingham, and was the daughter of a commercial traveller and Catherine. She attended the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire, Cardiff, where she studied with Professor Gilbert Norwood. Following her graduation in 1918, she remained there and was appointed Lecturer in Greek in 1919 and earned further degrees. From early in her career, Freeman worked to bring Greek texts and ideas to the general public through her work in translating texts and presenting her ideas to general audiences. Freeman featured on BBC radio in 1926 presenting the works of Aristophanes. During the Second World War Freeman delivered lectures on Greece to the Ministry of Information and in the National Scheme of Education for HM Forces in South Wales and Monmouthshire. She further contributed to the war effort with her selections of translations from Greek authors which featured in The Western Mail, a Cardiff-based newspaper. These were later published as the book, It Has All Happened Before: What the Greeks Thought of their Nazis. Her publications Voices of Freedom, What They Said at the Time: A Survey of the Causes of the Second World War and her work with the Philosophical Society of England, where she acted as Supervisor of Studies from 1948 to 1952 before becoming the Chairman in 1952, are further testimony to her desire to make Greek ideas accessible through translation. Freeman resigned from the university in 1946 in order to pursue her research and writing.
Academic Publications
1926 The Work and Life of Solon, with a translation of his poems, Cardiff, University of Wales Press Board.
1941 It Has All Happened Before: What the Greeks Thought of their Nazis, London, F. Muller Ltd.
1943 Voices of Freedom, London, F. Muller Ltd.
1945 What They Said at the Time: A Survey of the Causes of the Second World War, London, F. Muller Ltd.
1946 The Murder of Herodes and Other Trials from the Athenian law courts, London, MacDonald.
1947 The Greek way: an Anthology. Translations from verse and prose, London, MacDonald.
1947/48 Ancilla to the pre-Socratic philosophers: a complete translation of the fragments in Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., Blackwell and Harvard University Press.
1948 The Philoctetes of Sophocles, a modern version, London, Muller.
1950 Greek city-states, London, Macdonald; New York, W.W. Norton.
1952 God, Man and State. Greek concepts, London, Macdonald.
1954 The Paths of Justice, London, Lutterworth Press.
1954 Everyday things in Ancient Greece, London, Batsford. A one-volume revision of Everyday Things in Homeric Greece, Everyday Things in Archaic Greece, and Everyday Things in Classical Greece by C. H. Quennell and Marjorie Quennell. 1929-32.
1954 The Sophists. Translation of Mario Untersteiner, I sofisti, Oxford, Blackwell.
Fiction-writing career
Freeman enjoyed success as a writer of fiction and wrote under the pseudonyms Mary Fitt, Stuart Mary Wick, Clare St. Donat and Caroline Cory. In 1926, in addition to her study The Work and Life of Solon, Freeman published a collection of short storiesThe Intruder and Other Stories and her first novel Martin Hanner. A Comedy. In 1936 she chose the pseudonym Mary Fitt for her mysteries, writing 27 books and a number of short stories, many of which feature detective Inspector Mallett. She also wrote a number of children's stories and T'other Miss Austen, a study of Jane Austen. In recent years Freeman's work has been re-assessed, especially in the light of queer traditions in women's writing, and new editions of her short stories are planned.
Selected Fictional Publications
1926 The Intruder and Other Stories, London, J. Cape.
From some time in the 1930s until her death Freeman lived with her lifelong partner, Dr Liliane Marie Catherine Clopet, a GP and author, at Lark's Rise, a house in St Mellons. Freeman dedicated all her novels to Liliane from This Love onwards.
