Taking us from pregnancy through infancy, childhood and adolescence to adult life and death, this enthralling anthology of extracts from letters and diaries shows us some of the ways mothers and fathers have thought about and written to their children over the past eight hundred years. Familiar and surprising, moving and entertaining, and at times perversely reassuring, Louisa Lane Fox's selection demonstrates that though we may sometimes think that raising children in the twenty-first century is harder than ever before, the anxieties, hopes, difficulties and fears of parenthood have not, fundamentally, changed over the years.