My History

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.