This paper examines the seeming contradiction between the disavowal of moralizing in literature which Gray makes in his comments on Agnes Owens, and the extent to which Gray's critics have asserted a political message as a key constituent in his own work. In exploring this issue, focus falls in a large part on the less than positive appraisal of the 'radicalism' of Gray's politics offered by Alison Lumsden. Following on from several of Gray's commentators, the principle vehicle for Gray's political commentary within fiction is taken to be his explicit representation, in both realist and allegorical modes, of the political realities in which he writes. This grounding for his project is then shown to be incompatible with the politically radical message which Lumsden seems to imply as a necessary yet absent factor in Gray's work, while allowing some form of political intervention to be made without contradicting the rules Gray himself has suggested for political fiction. Important to this is the notion of an as-yet unrealised freedom beyond - both thematically and temporally - Gray's immediate focus, and of the individual actions within and against each entrapping political system which Gray's fiction recurrently represents and valorises.