Nancy Freedman | Novelist and feminist, 90

Nancy Freedman, 90, a novelist whose wide-ranging books include the best-selling

Mrs. Mike

, cowritten with her husband, has died.

Ms. Freedman died Aug. 10 of temporal arteritis, an autoimmune inflammatory disease of the arterial vascular system, at her home in Greenbrae, Calif., said her husband and frequent writing partner, Benedict Freedman.

In a literary career that began in the late 1940s and continued until her death, Ms. Freedman wrote or cowrote 20 novels.

The first, Mrs. Mike (1947), told the story of a 17-year-old Boston girl coping with living in Canada's northwest wilderness with her Mountie husband in the early 20th century. A best seller that appeared in 27 foreign editions and remains in print, the book was turned into a 1949 movie starring Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes.

Among her solo efforts are The Immortals, a 1977 novel that tells how oil came to dominate the modern world.

Benedict Freedman said, however, that "the bulk of her production could be characterized as ardently feminist." That includes Sappho: The Tenth Muse, a 1998 novel about the ancient Greek poet, and Mary, Mary Quite Contrary, a 1968 novel about the origins of the modern feminist movement in Britain in the late 18th century.

The daughter of a surgeon father and a journalist mother, Ms. Freedman was born Nancy Mars on July 4, 1920, in Evanston, Ill. She had rheumatic fever at 3, the same age at which she began acting professionally in local children's stage productions.

When the Freedmans were married in 1941, she had recently suffered a recurrence of rheumatic fever and was given three months to live.

"Her father told me that it was insane of me to want to marry a girl who had at most three months to live, and I said that Nancy and I had talked it over and had decided that even if it was only three months, we would want to enjoy it," recalled Benedict Freedman. - Los Angeles Times