“I often mark how different is the social state of American or English friends. They begin to seem to me a protected species; in one way, I could define my South Africanness by the extent to which they differ from me in their secure sense of what they are... they will never have to change the concept of who and what they are in relation to their country.” The point is debatable but significant to an understanding ‘writing freedom’ from Nadine Gordimer’s political and personal perspective. From the publication of her first stories in the 1950s The New Yorker gave Gordimer the financial independence and the literary kudos to achieve international recognition and readership for her writing: that is, it gave her ‘writing freedom’. But the writing freedom she achieved in the pages of The New Yorker came at a cost that ultimately she refused. By the 1970s Gordimer’s refusal to accept the notion of divide between art and politics would result in her final break with the magazine. The ‘room of her own’ offered by The New Yorker had windows but it also had walls, and although both could be constituted as a restriction or a liberation, the kind of life that might be lived in that room became untenable. The reason for this has much to do with Gordimer’s understanding of the act of writing that establishes and insists upon relationship between aesthetics and ethics, and the relationship between the individual writer and (South African) history.