My History A Memoir of Growing Up

Lady Antonia Fraser—novelist, historian, daughter of progressive aristocrats, and Dame of the British Empire—first fell in love with history in 1936 at the age of five, when she received a copy of H. E. Marshall’s Our Island Story for Christmas. The book sparked a passion that, thirty years later, inspired her to write the acclaimed biography Mary, Queen of Scots.

In these pages, Fraser turns her biographical skills inward to capture her own remarkable life story. From her idyllic early childhood to a wartime evacuation to North Oxford; from her education at a Catholic convent to holidays spent at Dunsany Castle and Pakenham Hall; from her days working in publishing to a turf battle with her mother over who would write about the Queen of Scots, My History is a singular, heartfelt memoir—and a love letter to a British way of life that has all but disappeared.

Antonia Fraser is the author of many internationally bestselling historical works, including Love and Louis XIV, Marie Antoinette, which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola, The Wives of Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots, Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot, and Perilous Question: Reform or Revolution? Britain on the Brink, 1832. She is also the author of Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter. She has received the Wolfson Prize for History, the 2000 Norton Medlicott Medal of Britain’s Historical Association, and the Franco-British Society’s Enid McLeod Literary Prize. She was made a Dame of the British Empire for services to Literature in 2011.