Esther Freud (b. 1963) is the daughter of artist Lucian Freud (1922-2011) and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis.

She is also a British novelist.

Freud’s most recent novel, I Couldn’t Love You Move (2021), was prompted by her mother’s experience of being 18, pregnant and terrified of being sent to a Mother and Baby Home—what she calls a “workhouse for morally defective women” (368). She, therefore, kept her pregnancy a secret.

I Couldn’t Love You Move (2021) tells the story of what might have happened if her mother hadn’t kept her secret.

It is about 3 women: a grandmother who doesn’t know that her eldest daughter has given birth to a girl in a Mother and Baby Home; the mother who was in that home and forced to give up her daughter; and the daughter who is looking for her birth mother.