Smith uses clean and unsentimental language to make the reader feel a great deal. This is down to tremendous technical control and faculties of perceptiveness and compassion. ‘Free Love’ is a story of lesbian sexual discovery with an optimistic, bittersweet ending. It reads like real life. You can just picture the Amsterdam of this story in summertime: all canals and sunshine, a site of desire and potential, full of hope and openness and heady, finite young love.
From Free Love, Virago, 1995
A Personal Anthology 