{"id":5729,"date":"2015-01-29T12:35:23","date_gmt":"2015-01-29T12:35:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5729"},"modified":"2015-02-02T12:27:10","modified_gmt":"2015-02-02T12:27:10","slug":"my-history-by-lady-antonia-fraser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=5729","title":{"rendered":"My History by Lady Antonia Fraser"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A Memoir of Growing Up<\/strong><\/p>\n

Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 8 January 2015<\/strong><\/p>\n

320pp, hardback, \u00a320<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Jessica Mann<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Warning: this reviewer knows the author of this book. We have friends in common, we have belonged to the same organizations, we occasionally meet at parties.\u00a0 But decades before we met, Antonia Fraser, then still Antonia Pakenham, was an object of envy for a 1950s\u2019 teenager who read about her in gossip columns.\u00a0 She seemed to have everything that a girl could want: she was clever, posh and pretty – even prettier when she became what in those days was called \u2018a bottle blonde\u2019. These memoirs show that Antonia really did have everything and know everyone. Almost every name mentioned in My History<\/em> is a famous or an aristocratic one.<\/p>\n

Antonia was born in 1932, the eldest of eight children, and grew up in Oxford, where her father, Frank Pakenham, later the Earl of Longford, was a don. This book contains many affectionate accounts of his virtue and unworldliness. Antonia\u2019s mother, born Elizabeth Harman, was equally remarkable. A committed political activist for the Labour party, she stood unsuccessfully for parliament, her activities never curtailed by pregnancy or by the demands of her four sons and four daughters. When it became obvious that she was not going to \u00a0achieve a political career of her own she turned to writing biographies (Queen Victoria, The Duke of Wellington etc) and had to be firmly diverted from her plan to write about Mary Queen of Scots. Her daughter had already staked a claim to that one.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth\u2019s \u2018natural puritanism\u2019 combined with wartime shortages and her husband\u2019s \u2018total indifference to material comfort\u2019 meant that life in North Oxford was pretty uncomfortable. But holidays were in Irish castles and English mansions, and home was next door to the Dragon School, a boys\u2019 prep school which admitted a few girls and gave them a much better education than was usually available for females. While she was there, Antonia, who at age four had read herself Our Island Story,<\/em> developed her lifelong passion for History \u2013 the word always given a capital letter in this book. \u2018I had always known exactly what I wanted to do, which was to write History.\u2019<\/p>\n

After the Dragon came an unhappy year at boarding school in Salisbury followed by a happy one at a Catholic school, where Antonia was received into the Catholic Church. It meant a lot to her then and apparently still does now.<\/p>\n

Next, the gap year, the university years (Antonia was at Lady Margaret Hall\u00a0 in Oxford), the\u00a0 employment years, when her mother arranged for her to work at the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and marriage to Hugh Fraser,\u00a0 a dashing Scot who happened to be a Conservative MP.\u00a0 At last, in 1965, Antonia Fraser embarked on her real career and the work she had always wanted to do \u2013 writing History.\u00a0 Her first serious biography, a labour of love about Mary Queen of Scots, became a bestseller and was enjoyed both by professional historians and by the public. \u00a0More biographies followed: Oliver Cromwell,\u00a0 Charles II,\u00a0 Marie Antoinette and others, and \u00a0she also wrote\u00a0 a series of\u00a0 excellent crime novels.\u00a0 But those came later, as did the love of her life, Harold Pinter, about whom she wrote in Must You Go<\/em>?<\/p>\n

My History<\/em> covers the first third of its author\u2019s life and Must You Go?<\/em>\u00a0 the most recent years. \u00a0I do hope the next volume is being written to fill the gap, for this interesting and enjoyable book has made me as curious about Antonia Fraser\u2019s life as I was at the age of sixteen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Jessica Mann<\/p>\n

Antonia was born in 1932, the eldest of eight children, and grew up in Oxford, where her father, Frank Pakenham, later the Earl of Longford, was a don. This book contains many affectionate accounts of his virtue and unworldliness. Antonia\u2019s mother, born Elizabeth Harman, was equally remarkable. A committed political activist for the Labour party, she stood unsuccessfully for parliament, her activities never curtailed by pregnancy or by the demands of her four sons and four daughters […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5729","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5729"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5739,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5729\/revisions\/5739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}