Kathleen and Frank - (FSG Classics) by Christopher Isherwood (Paperback)

About the Book

"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, Blaeriot'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"--

Book Synopsis

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, Blériot'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.

Review Quotes

"Show[s] a deeper understanding of much that [Isherwood] had once rebelled against." --W. J. Weatherby, The Guardian

"A moving account of [Isherwood's] parents' marriage based on their letters and diaries." --Mark Bostridge, The Independent on Sunday

"[A] social history of the first half of the [twentieth] century . . . Christopher writes about Christopher with fine, clear, cool precision." --Patrick Skene Catling, The Spectator

About the Author

Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was born in Manchester, England, and lived in Berlin from 1929 to 1933 and immigrated to the United States in 1939. A major figure in twentieth-century fiction and the gay rights movement, he wrote more than twenty books. FSG Classics presents some of his finest work, including the novels Prater Violet, A Single Man, and A Meeting by the River; the semi-autobiographical Lions and Shadows; and the memoir Christopher and His Kind.