Anna Wulf Molly's flat, Bloomsbury
Free Women
The book opens and keeps returning to two women alone in a flat: Anna, a novelist who has stopped writing, and her friend Molly, an actress. Their long conversations about men, politics and going slightly mad hold the whole structure together. Lessing never pins the flat to a street, but its world of books and lapsed causes belongs to literary Bloomsbury.
Free Women (framing narrative)
inspired by The novel keeps the flat's address vague, calling it only a London flat. We site it in Bloomsbury, the district of writers, publishers and left-wing talk that the framing chapters evoke, as a representative point rather than a fixed door.
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Anna Wulf The Soho coffee bars, Frith Street
Free Women
Between the flat and the meetings, much of the book's London happens over coffee: the writers, film people and disenchanted comrades who fill Anna's days meet and argue in the cafes of the West End. Soho's espresso bars, led by the Moka on Frith Street, were the new social ground of exactly that late-1950s crowd.
Free Women and the blue notebook
inferred The novel sends its characters to cafes and coffee bars without fixing an address. We mark Frith Street in Soho, home of the Moka, London's first espresso bar, opened 1953, as a representative point for the milieu the book moves through.
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