Antonia Fraser turns a historian’s eye on her own upbringing, with thrilling results
Wisdom of youth: Antonia on her engagement to her first husband, Hugh Fraser, in August 1956 Photo: Thomas Pakenham
The children of famous parents often struggle to escape their shadow, especially when, professionally, they follow in their footsteps. The historian Antonia Fraser had a well-known father in the Labour Cabinet minister and penal reformer Lord Longford, but she potentially owed more in career terms to her equally celebrated mother, Elizabeth Longford, the award-winning biographer of Wellington and Queen Victoria. Yet, as this warm, witty memoir of her childhood and early adult life reveals with great charm, Fraser has always been very much her own person.
It started early. Just short of 16, in July 1948, she returned home from her Roman Catholic boarding school with an overfull school trunk. “Won’t you need your eiderdown and your sheets at school next term?” Elizabeth Longford asked her daughter. “No, because I’ve left,” came the reply.
Many parents might have been tempted to say something along the lines of “over my dead body”, especially if they were paying the school fees, but to her credit Lady Longford simply wondered aloud, “so what will you do?” “I’ll think of something,” her eldest child (of eight) reassured her with the boundless self-belief of a not-quite-16-year-old. “I felt full of confidence,” she writes in My History, “that a glorious future awaited me: I would be a secretary, earn some money and go to parties in the evening.”
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