Antonia Fraseron how the strong female characters and implicit romance in the Book of Ruth had a profound effect on her own development
My introduction to the Bible was strictly commercial. Our family – we were then four and became eight – were told that we had to learn a verse of the Bible every Sunday to earn our pocket money. We lived at the time in North Oxford, since my father was a don at the University and my mother, the bossy one, rather gave us to imagine that every North Oxford child learnt the Bible for the sake of their pocket money: although, curiously enough, I never found myself discussing the subject with my girl friends at the Dragon School. We preferred peeping at the end of the grown-ups’ novels for certain incidents, certain unions, shall we say, of a romantic nature.
