My History: A Memoir of Growing Up by Antonia Fraser review – from ‘feral’ to fairytale heroine

Antonia Fraser had, by her own account, an enchanted childhood, so much so that when she heard the bells of Magdalen College again more than 60 years later, “wonderland once more returned”. She dreamed she was the heroine of a fairytale, “the beggar girl (intensely beautiful) who, armed with a first-class degree, wrote bestselling books”. It was standard stuff for a girl growing up in Oxford whose father was a don at Christ Church, but not all dreams come true as emphatically as this one.

Her parents had married in 1931, the year before Fraser was born, on a combined unearned income of £1,000 a year, which counted in their view as poverty (average annual earnings in the UK at the time came to about £190). Both were prospective Labour MPs. Fraser’s mother, Elizabeth Harman, was a great-niece of the radical reformer Joseph Chamberlain; her father was Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford, grandson of the fabled Tory hostess, Lady Jersey. Fraser and her seven younger siblings grew up hearing their mother regularly lament “the extravagance, fecklessness, unpunctuality and impracticality of the upper class – as epitomised by our father”. The happiness of their marriage was well-known all the same: their lifelong love affair started with Elizabeth’s first sight of Frank, fast asleep at an Oxford student ball and handsome as a young Greek god; when the same thing happened again the next night, she woke him with a kiss.

My History is full of contradictions like this that hint at harsher undertones. On the one hand, Fraser flourished as one of the few girls at the highly competitive Dragon School, where she wrote poetry in Latin and shone on the rugger field, prevented from playing away games only by the lack of girls’ changing rooms at boys’ prep schools. On the other hand, her parents rarely seemed to care, sometimes even to notice, what she did. Politics and childcare kept them “too frantically busy” to help her with her homework, visit her in hospital when she had her tonsils removed, or turn up to take her out once she transferred to a more conventional girls’ boarding school. She felt in these years “like a feral child … brought up by wolves”. At home they called her “the gap-tooth hag”.

Like many clever children of indifferent or neglectful parents, Fraser responded by living largely in her mind and her imagination. She learned to read properly at four with Our Island Story, sowing the seeds of a phenomenally successful future career as a historical biographer. History became ever after her refuge and her wonderland. She read hard and fast, covering the field from Georgette Heyer and Barbara Cartland to Trollope, Carlyle and Macaulay. Long afterwards she recognised the seriousness of her relationship with Harold Pinter when she realised she hadn’t read a book since they first got together, something she had never been stopped from doing since she was four.

Fraser learned early in life to blank out sources of dismay. Her siblings barely figure in My History, except for her brother Thomas, who was 11 months younger and in some ways an alter ego. In spite of, or perhaps owing to, their closeness, she retains no memories of his succumbing in 1936 to a polio epidemic from which he emerged, aged four, wearing a leather-and-steel contraption to support his neck and side. “No one since has ever questioned Thomas’s powers of endurance: it is as though the steel and leather entered his soul at this point.”

An answering toughness was compounded in his sister by charm, looks and unbudgeable determination. When their mother declined to arrange her presentation at court, Antonia brought herself out, wangling her way on to debutante guest lists, making her own ball gowns and chaperoning herself at dances. Characteristically, she had already covered her exit by securing a scholarship to read PPE at Oxford (“there was one question I never thought to ask: what is PPE?”).

Debonair, capable and confident in public, she was haunted by a secret image of herself as a lonely wallflower, sitting beside the dance floor at Buckingham Palace friendless and partnerless until one of her parents’ friends took pity on her: “Suddenly Hugh Gaitskell swooped by in white tie and tails. We danced and danced. Like Cinderella, I felt myself transformed into the belle of the ball.”

That transformation scene – snatching success from the jaws of imagined failure – lies at the core of this fascinating book. Presumably the root of Fraser’s self-dissatisfaction was her mother, who consistently ignored or underrated her daughter’s early triumphs: “‘Who came first?’ was her only comment when I proudly announced I had come second in maths.”

The problem seems to have been that the two used extraordinarily similar gifts in pursuit of entirely different goals. Both became what used to be called grandes dames: bold, brilliant and beautiful, party-goers and -givers, as well as being intelligent, well-educated and hugely industrious. But Elizabeth was born, like her Chamberlain great-uncle, to set the world to rights: a cradle feminist, socialist and campaigner to her fingertips, she believed passionately in equal rights, birth control and workers’ education.

She met her match in her eldest daughter. Antonia was a throwback to her paternal great-grandmother, Lady Jersey, another dazzling socialite who knew everybody, went everywhere, had read every book and entertained not only the top politicians but also the leading authors of the day. Fraser would in due course cap all that by writing books herself as well, but for the moment she was still in training.

As a teenager poring over photos of society beauties in old copies of the Tatler, she seemed bird-witted to her mother. “Elizabeth did not understand that her frivolity was my serious glamour,” Antonia writes, pinpointing the underlying friction that rubbed them both raw at times. It came to a head a few years later in a dress shop, with Elizabeth searching for a cheap outfit to wear at Antonia’s wedding because, as she explained, she’d promised to donate the price of her dress to Oxfam. “This is my wedding,” replied the exasperated bride, “not your bloody good deed.”

She married the Tory MP Sir Hugh Fraser in 1956 in a spectacularly low-cut, tight-fitting, full-skirted dress with lavish white veiling held in place by a heart-shaped pearl headdress copied from Mary Queen of Scots’ in Our Island Story. Tension between mother and daughter would be magically resolved over the next decade in favour of mutual intimacy and admiration, stemming from the triumphant publication of Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Queen Victoria for which Antonia was largely responsible.

Her first and only job on leaving Oxford had been to work for the whizzkid publisher George Weidenfeld, a man who never underestimated the importance of seriously glamorous literary parties. Neither marriage nor the births of six children in quick succession diminished her enthusiasm as a talent scout. “I was able to oversee the transformation of my mother from active politician to published author,” she writes of the manoeuvre that transformed their relationship.

A potentially devastating clash arose when her mother airily announced the subject of her next biography. “‘But you can’t do that!’ I cried in a strangled voice, ‘She’s my Mary Queen of Scots!’” Metaphorically speaking, Fraser had worn blue velvet ever since she first saw a portrait of the queen at the age of four. The relevant illustration, reproduced towards the end of My History, pictures Mary as a ravishing Edwardian hostess (Our Island Story was published in 1905) in a body-hugging, floor-length blue gown, her small, sad white face exquisitely set off by lace and pearls.

Danger was narrowly averted with Elizabeth’s magnanimous offer to write about the Duke of Wellington instead. And so, thanks to her mother, Fraser finally sat down to write the book about Mary Queen of Scots that would make her childhood dream come true. The biography moved steadily up the UK and US bestseller lists to settle at No 2 (cheated of first place by All You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask). It makes a fairytale finish to a book that ends, as it began, in wonderland.