The Leather Boys one starts chatting him up. When Pete walks in they all recognise him and Reggie suddenly understands that Pete too is gay. He leaves. The book was published in 1961 under the pseudonym Eliot George—an inversion of the pen-name of the famous 19th century female author, Mary Ann Evans, who published as George Eliot. Freeman is credited under her own name in the film as the author of the screenplay based on the novel of "Eliot George". The original novel is explicit about the sexual relationship between the two male characters, and about the odds that the hero's wife is
Mary Ann Hanway Mary Ann Hanway Mary Ann Hanway was an eighteenth-century travel writer and novelist. She has been proposed as the anonymous author of "Journey to the Highlands of Scotland" (1777). Hanway was also the author of "Christabelle, the Maid of Rouen" (1814), in which a woman's father loses their family's fortune, and she joins a nunnery, "Ellinor" (1798), and "Andrew Stuart" (1800). Hanway did not always find the process of writing easy, declaring in the preface to her 1809 novel "Falconbridge Abbey", that "four years it has been procrastinated, from a series of ill health, having laid dormant in my desk