Historian (and novelist) Antonia Fraser pens a second memoir

When she arrived as a boarder at the Godolphin School in 1944, at the age of 12, Antonia Pakenham — who would grow up to be the novelist and historian Lady Antonia Fraser, Dame of the British Empire, mother of six, grandmother of 18, wife of the Tory M.P. Hugh Fraser and, later, wife of the playwright Harold Pinter — made the startling discovery that she was “not really a girl.” That is, having just spent four years learning Greek and Latin at a school for boys (mostly) called the Dragon, next door to her family’s home in Oxford, England, she excelled at ancient languages and at the knock-’em-sock-’em sport of rugby, but was completely unschooled in conventional girlish behavior. In her new memoir, “My History,” she recalls, “I was like Kipling’s Mowgli in ‘The Jungle Book,’ the feral child who had been brought up by wolves and had difficulty adjusting to existence among human beings.”

Readers may smile at Fraser’s comparison of her aristocratic Oxfordshire upbringing to the forest primeval. Nevertheless, it is true that the Pakenhams were not typical of most British families of the 1930s, the ’40s and the postwar era; nor did Mr. and Mrs. Pakenham (the future Lord and Lady Longford) remotely resemble today’s smothering helicopter parents. Fraser’s father — an Oxford don and Labour politician, the hereditary ­Anglo-Irish peer Frank Pakenham, Seventh Earl of Longford — and her ­Oxford-educated Socialist mother, the historian Elizabeth Harman Longford, ran frequently for political office while raising eight children (with the help of nannies).

Fraser remembers her father as a “benign presence,” devoted to social reform, who was saintly, she jests, in that he “did not seem particularly concerned with earthly things, that is to say, his children.” Her mother, “sharp, competitive” and preoccupied with “small children and politics,” encouraged autonomy in her eldest child, taking pride in her ability, for instance, to travel alone from Oxford to London during the Blitz (to see the doctor) by “train, tube, bus, bicycle and feet!” — ­returning home, “fortunately,” Fraser wryly notes, in time “to miss the start of the bombing.” In 1950, during a Parliamentary bid, Lady Pakenham enlisted Antonia (who was then 17 and had been accepted to Oxford) to join her at a campaign event. When an audience member shouted that the candidate was neglecting her children by running for office, Lady Pakenham called on her daughter — pink-cheeked, tall and blooming — to stand, and retorted, “Does she look neglected?” The audience reacted with “a roar of laughter,” Fraser recalls. “Shared Labour politics,” she writes, was the “dominating atmosphere of my childhood.”

And yet, as her memoir attests, an alternate atmosphere, having nothing to do with contemporary polls and pols, played an equally strong and ultimately more defining role in Fraser’s future course: the “faery lands of history” that she vicariously roamed in books about kings, queens, warriors and rebels. A voracious reader from the age of 4, she devoured novels and poetry, but it was fact, not fiction, that most nourished her imagination. One book, a children’s history of England called “Our Island Story,” which she received for Christmas in 1936, kicked off her lifelong obsession with biography. Reading with “burning interest” tales of Guy Fawkes, Empress Matilda (besieged in 1141 during a fight for the British throne), Mary Queen of Scots and the Jacobite heroine Flora Macdonald, she resolved “more or less instantly” to write “beautiful big histories myself, never mind that I was still a little person.” At 22, in 1954, while working for the publisher George Weidenfeld in London, Fraser wrote her first book, a retelling for children of Thomas Malory’s tales of King Arthur. Fifteen years later, by which time she had become a wife and mother (of six), she published her first “beautiful big” history: a biography of Mary Queen of Scots. To research her subject, she threw herself at her goal with the same fleet-footed determination she had shown as a Dragon schoolgirl, in one instance, clambering with a tape measure onto Mary’s tomb in Westminster Abbey — while heavily pregnant and clad in a bulky dark fur coat — to measure the length of the queen’s face on her life-size marble statue. A guard stopped her, seeing something he “must have taken for an escaped bear,” Fraser writes. She adds, “I was not at all abashed.” ...