Kathleen and Frank: The Autobiography of a Family

Kathleen and Frank is a love story set in the glory days of the British Empire, the last decades before World War I

It is the story of Christopher Isherwood's parents, the winsome and lively daughter of a successful wine merchant and the reticent, artistically gifted soldier-son of a country squire. They met in 1895 outside a music rehearsal in an army camp and married in 1903 after Christopher's father returned from the Boer War. Frank was killed in an assault near Ypres in 1915; Kathleen remained a widow for the rest of her life.

Their story is told through letters and Kathleen's diary, with connecting commentary by Isherwood. Kathleen and Frank is a family memoir, but it is also a richly detailed social history of a period of striking change-- Queen Victoria's funeral, Bl riot's flight across the English Channel, Sarah Bernhardt's Hamlet, suffragettes, rising hemlines, the beginning of the Troubles in Ireland--the period that shaped Isherwood himself.

As a young man, Isherwood fled the tragedy that engulfed his parents' lives and threatened his own; in Kathleen and Frank, he reweaves the tapestry of family and heritage and places himself in the pattern.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 11/03/2015
ISBN: 9780374180973
Pages: 528
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 1.30d