“His lips even made small preliminary movements before a mouthful, like an old person’s. Or like a blind man, thought Anna, recognising the movement; once she had sat opposite a blind man on the train.”

This section, in the first part of Free Women, the novel-within-the-novel, foreshadows Tommy’s suicide attempt and subsequent blindness. It also serves to characterize Tommy’s personality: He is older than his years, with the conservative tendencies and fastidiousness that, for a man of his class, are thought to come with age. He is more like his father, Richard, than either Anna or his mother, Molly, would like to admit.

“But you write and write in notebooks, saying what you think about life, but you lock them up, and that’s not being responsible.”

Tommy points out Anna’s hypocrisy, that she writes without acting, even keeping her thoughts from being published. Anna herself often points out this hypocrisy within the British Communist Party, that their function is to meet and to talk about problems without ever taking any definite action.

“The novel has become a function of the fragmented society, the fragmented consciousness. Human beings are so divided, are becoming more and more divided, and more subdivided in themselves, reflecting the world, that they reach out desperately, not knowing they do it, for information about other groups inside their own country, let alone about groups in other countries. It is a blind grasping out for their own wholeness.”

Here, Anna’s literary criticism reflects not only her own dilemma as a writer—who is experiencing a reluctance to write, or a writer’s block—but also her own dilemma as a person. She has divided herself into parts, represented by the four notebooks, which is what keeps her from engaging in meaningful relationships and work. The novel conveys her journey toward unity.