Kathleen and Frank.
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 1972
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 510
Subjects: Isherwood, Christopher, 1904-  -- Family; Isherwood, Kathleen Machell Smith, 1868-1960; Isherwood, Francis Edward Bradshaw, 1869-1915; Authors, English -- 20th century -- Family relationships
Description: "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."--Amazon.com.