Kathleen and Frank: The Autobiography of a Family: FSG Classics

"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, Bleriot 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."