June 8, 2015
Eminent British historian and novelist Fraser (Perilous Question, Jemina Shore mysteries, etc.) devotes much of this witty, perambulating memoir of youth and early adulthood to the unlikely yet enduring bond of her curiously matched parents, who both became loyal Labour leaders, Catholic converts, and devotees of socialist causes. Fraser was the first of eight children; her mother was a college-educated daughter of a middle-class Oxford doctor. An early reader, she grew passionately attached to the “sheer vitality” of storytelling and a “primitive identification” with tragic heroines like Queen Matilda and Mary, Queen of Scots, the latter of whom would later feature in her first book. Fraser moved to a town near Oxford during the Blitz and attended a mostly boys’ school called the Dragon. She was headstrong, taking a gap year before reading history at Oxford and engineering her own social debut in 1950. Her first job, as assistant at the publishing house of Weidenfeld and Nicholson, brought her into contact with the likes of Sonia Orwell (George Orwell’s wife), novelist Angus Wilson, and photographer Cecil Beaton; her first marriage, to older Tory MP Hugh Fraser, followed a very brief courtship, and they had six children in 10 years. Her resolve to write a biography of Mary, Queen of Scots, resulted from a burst of competition with her mother. This memoir, nuanced and emotionally oblique in a most English fashion, offers a textured glimpse into a bygone era.
August 1, 2015
Prolific fiction and nonfiction writer Fraser recounts her lifelong love affair with history in this engaging memoir. Set mostly during her formative years in the 1930s and 1940s, her book chronicles her less-than-orthodox upbringing as the oldest of eight children born to eccentric aristocrats devoted to social reform, her wartime experiences as an evacuee attending a boys prep school, her family's conversion to Catholicism, and a host of other experiences and events that informed her literary imagination and ignited her passion for history. After her Oxford University years, the leap to the sometimes glamorous world of publishing, where she made numerous literary and social contacts, was a natural one. Culminating with the publication of her first book, the best-selling Mary Queen of Scots, this autobiographical journey is distinguished by Fraser's contagious enthusiasm for all things historical, including her own remarkable past.High Demand Backstory: Fraser's books on British history remain popular with public-library-going readers, so requests for her memoir may be strong.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
August 1, 2015
Fraser (Mary Queen of Scots; Marie Antoinette: The Journey) has loved history since first reading H.E. Marshall's Our Island Story at age four. In this memoir, she traces her early years as the eldest of eight in a wealthy Anglo-Irish family, headed by her Labor minister father, the Earl of Longford, and socialist mother. In reaction to her busy parents' early neglect, Fraser turned to reading and flights of imagination. Not taking herself too seriously, she approaches childhood visits to eccentric relatives and playing "rugger" at the Dragon School with a self-deprecating humor. She admits that parties and boys interested her more than her studies at Oxford University. Despite a reputation as a beautiful socialite married to a Tory minister, Fraser began a long, successful writing career with the best-selling biography Mary Queen of Scots. VERDICT Readers seeking spicy tidbits about Fraser's relationship with second husband Harold Pinter will not find them here. This prequel to her autobiography, Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter, while at times bogged down in detail, will amuse and delight memoir lovers interested in upper-class British life of the mid-20th century. [See Prepub Alert, 4/27/15.]--Nancy R. Ives, SUNY at Geneseo
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
May 15, 2015
Wolfson Prize-winning and best-selling historian Fraser recounts her early years, starting with how the receipt of H.E. Marshall's Our Island Story as a Christmas gift in 1936 ignited her interest in history. Her memories range from holidays at Dunsany Castle to selling hats postwar, but her wartime evacuation to North Oxford proves key--for one thing, it was there that she studied at a Catholic convent and decided to convert.
Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.