Kathleen and Frank (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780374180973)

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, Bl riot'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.

Author: Christopher Isherwood
ISBN-10: 0374180970
ISBN-13: 9780374180973
Publisher: St. Martins Press-3PL
Language: English
Published: 11/03/2015
Pages: 528
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 1.30d