Unseen Anne Frank letters illuminate life before confinement

Translated into English for the first time, letters to grandmother and others reveal context of birthdays, boys and braces as well as the rising Nazi menace

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A younger, lighter version of Anne Frank – a little girl with braces, who doesn’t want to have her hair cut and who has “no lack of companionship as far as boys are concerned” – has been revealed for the first time in English, through a series of previously unpublished letters written to her grandmother.

Part of the forthcoming Anne Frank: The Collected Works, the letters have never been published in full, or in English, before. They were written between 1936 and 1941, before Anne began the diary she kept from her 13th birthday on 12 June 1942, until the moment just over two years later when the Nazis raided the secret annexe where she had been living in hiding with her family.

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