Life
She was born in Southsea, Portsmouth, Hampshire. Her father, a devout Anglican, was a naval engineer who began working in the shipyards as a teenager and supervised the construction of British warships in the years leading up to World War I. Although one of her older sisters attended Girton College, Cambridge, like many independent women scholars, Frances was educated at home by her mother, yet attended Birkenhead High School for some time. Through part-time correspondence study, she was granted degree in French at University College, London (UCL), achieving firsts, in 1924, and an MA at the same institution on French Theater in 1926. The youngest of four children, she grew up in a middle class family whose Victorian worldview influenced her later scholarship. The death of her only brother in World War I, along with the ravages of World War II, underscored her disdain for rampant nationalism. She espoused interdisciplinary historiography, and for more than forty years she was affiliated with the Warburg Institute, University of London.
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