Antonia Fraser

Family background and education

Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser was born in London on 27 August 1932 as the first of the eight children of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), and his wife, Elizabeth, Countess of Longford (née Harman; 1906–2002). As the daughter of an earl, she is accorded the courtesy title "Lady" and thus customarily addressed formally as "Lady Antonia".

As a teenager, she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents. Her "maternal grandparents were Unitarians – a non-conformist faith with a strong emphasis on social reform". In response to criticism of her writing about Oliver Cromwell, she has said, "I have no Catholic blood". Before his own conversion in his thirties following a nervous breakdown in the British Army, as she explains: "My father was Protestant Church of Ireland, and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20 when she abandoned it."

She was educated at Dragon School in Oxford, St Mary's School, Ascot, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater. Prior to going to the University of Oxford in 1950, she was a debutante in the London social season.

Career

Fraser began work as an "all-purpose assistant" for George Weidenfeld at Weidenfeld & Nicolson (her "only job"), which later became her own publisher and part of Orion Publishing Group, which publishes her works in the UK.

Biography and history

Fraser's first major work was Mary, Queen of Scots (1969), published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which was followed by several other biographies, including Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973).

Fraser acknowledges she is "less interested in ideas than in 'the people who led nations' and so on. I don't think I could ever have written a history of political thought or anything like that. I'd have to come at it another way." Fraser's study, The Warrior Queens (1989), is an account of military royal women since the days of Boadicea and Cleopatra. In 1992, a year after Alison Weir's book The Six Wives of Henry VIII, she published a book with the same title.

She chronicled the life and times of Charles II in a well-reviewed 1979 eponymous biography. Fraser served as editor for many monarchical biographies, including those featured in the Kings and Queens of England and Royal History of England series, and in 1996 she also published a book entitled The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605, which won both the St. Louis Literary Award and the Crime Writers' Association (CWA) Non-Fiction Gold Dagger.

Her book Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001), was adapted for the film Marie Antoinette (2006), directed by Sofia Coppola, with Kirsten Dunst in the title role, and Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (2006). She contemplated a biography of Queen Elizabeth I, but shelved the idea as this subject has already been extensively covered.

Fraser won the Wolfson History Award in 1984 for The Weaker Vessel, a study of women's lives in 17th-century England.

Other writing

Fraser has written detective novels, the most popular a series of ten written between 1977 and 1995 and involving a female television personality and detective named Jemima Shore; the latter were adapted into the television series Jemima Shore Investigates, which aired in the UK in 1983.

Media and societies

From 1988 to 1989 Fraser was president of English PEN, and she chaired its Writers in Prison Committee.

From 1983 to 1984 she was president of the Sir Walter Scott Club in Edinburgh. She serves as a judge for the Enid McLeod Literary Prize, awarded by the Franco-British Society, previously winning that prize for her biography Marie Antoinette.

Fraser is a vice-president of the London Library. She has also been a vice-president of the Royal Stuart Society.

Fraser was a contestant on the BBC Radio 4 panel game My Word! from 1979 to 1990.

Memoirs

Fraser's first memoir Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter was published in January 2010 and she read a shortened version as BBC Radio Four's Book of the Week that month. Her second memoir, My History. A Memoir of Growing Up was published a few years later.

Marriages and later life

From 1956 until their divorce in 1977, she was married to Sir Hugh Fraser (1918–1984), a descendant of Scottish aristocracy 14 years her senior and a Roman Catholic Conservative Unionist MP in the House of Commons (sitting for Stafford), who was a friend of the American Kennedy family. They had six children, including Rebecca Fraser and Flora Fraser.

On 22 October 1975 Hugh and Antonia Fraser, together with Caroline Kennedy, who was visiting them at their Holland Park home, in Kensington, west London, were almost blown up by a Provision Irish Republican Army car bomb placed under the wheels of his Jaguar car, which had been triggered to go off at 9 am when he left the house; the bomb exploded, killing the cancer researcher Gordon Hamilton Fairley. Fairley, a neighbour of the Frasers, had been walking his dog, when he noticed something amiss and stopped to examine the bomb.

In 1975 she began an affair with the playwright Harold Pinter, who was then married to the actress Vivien Merchant. Harold Pinter died of cancer on 24 December 2008, aged 78.

Fraser lives at Campden Hill Square, in the London district of Holland Park, in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, south of Notting Hill Gate, in the Fraser family home, where she still writes in her fourth-floor study.

Honours

Fraser was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1999 Birthday Honours and promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2011 New Year Honours for services to literature. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to literature. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2003.

Archives

Fraser's uncatalogued papers (relating to her "Early Writing", "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction") are on loan at the British Library. Papers by and relating to Fraser are also catalogued as part of the Harold Pinter Archive, which is part of its permanent collection of Additional Manuscripts.

Awards

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1969), for her book Mary, Queen of Scots.
• Wolfson History Prize (1984), for her book The Weaker Vessel.
• Crime Writers' Association Macallan Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction (1996), for her book The Gunpowder Plot.
• St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates.
• Historical Association Norton Medlicott Medal (2000).
• Enid McLeod Literary Prize (2001), from the Franco-British Society, for Marie Antoinette.

Works

Non-fiction works

• Mary Queen of Scots (1969). .
  • Reissued, Phoenix paperback, 2001; .
  • 40th-anniversary edition, reissued Orion paperback, 7 May 2009; .
• Dolls (1963)
• A History of Toys (1966)
• Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973);
  • Also published as Cromwell: The Lord Protector. .
• King James VI and I (1974)
• The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (1975) [editor]
• King Charles II (1979)
  • Also published as Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration and Charles II; .
• Heroes and Heroines (1980)
• The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-century England (1984)
• The Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (1988), Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London.
  • Also published as Warrior Queens: The Legends and Lives of Women Who have led Their Nations in War.
• The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1992); Orion, 1999, .
  • Rpt. & updated edition, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007.
  • Also published as the Orion audio-book The Six Wives of Henry VIII (November 2006); .
  • The illustrated edition is The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Illustrated Edition (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996); .
  • The first paperback edition is The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Mandarin, 1993); .
  • The 1st American edition is entitled The Wives of Henry VIII (New York: Knopf, 1992); .
• The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (1996)
  • Also published as Faith and Treason: The Gunpowder Plot; .
• Marie Antoinette (2001);
  • Also published with the subtitle Marie Antoinette: The Journey, (2002); .
• Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (2006); .
• Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter (2010), London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion Books); .
  • 1st U.S. edition, New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; .
  • 1st paperback edition London: Phoenix, 2010;
  • Also published in audio & digital editions) - "Shortlisted for Galaxy National Book Awards: Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2010."
• Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 (2013);
• My History. A Memoir of Growing Up (2015), New York: Doubleday.
• Our Israeli Diary: Of That Time, Of That Place (2017);
• The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829 (2018);
• The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women (2021);
• Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023);

Historical fiction

• King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1954)
• Robin Hood (1955)

Jemima Shore novels

• Quiet as a Nun (1977)
• The Wild Island (1978). Also published as Tartan Tragedy.
• A Splash of Red (1981)
• Cool Repentance (1982)
• Oxford Blood (1985)
• Jemima Shore's First Case (1986)
• Your Royal Hostage (1987)
• The Cavalier Case (1990)
• Jemima Shore at the Sunny Grave (1991)
• Political Death (1995)
• Quiet as a Nun / Tartan Tragedy / Splash of Red (omnibus) (2005)
• Jemima Shore on the Case (omnibus) (2006)

Editor

• Scottish Love Poems (1975)
• The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England (1975)
• Love Letters (1976)
• The Pleasure of Reading (1992)
• A Red Rose or A Satin Heart (2010)

Notes

References

1. (27 July 2008). "Antonia Fraser".
2. [[Mel Gussow]], [https://www.nytimes.com/1984/09/09/magazine/antonia-fraser-the-lady-is-a-writer.html?sec=health&pagewanted=7 "The Lady Is a Writer"], ''[[The New York Times Magazine]]'', 9 September 1984, Sec. 6, Health: 60, col. 2. Print. [[The New York Times Company]], 9 September 1984; retrieved 8 April 2009.
3. Antonia Fraser, [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/mar/16/writers.rooms.antonia.fraser "Writer's Rooms: Antonia Fraser"], ''[[The Guardian. Guardian]]'', Culture: Books, [[Guardian Media Group]], 13 June 2008; retrieved 8 April 2009. (Includes photograph of Antonia Fraser's study.)
4. [http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/8238-5/Author-Antonia-Fraser.htm "Non-Fiction: Author: Antonia Fraser"] {{webarchive. link. (20 November 2012 , Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009]; retrieved 9 April 2009.)
5. Ginny Dougary, [https://web.archive.org/web/20081015190149/http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article4241665.ece "Lady Antonia Fraser's Life Less Ordinary"]
   "In a Frank Interview, the Famed Writer Talks about Motherhood, Catholicism, Her Parents and Soulmate [[Harold Pinter]]", ''[[The Times]]'', [[News Corporation (1980–2013). News Corporation]], 5 July 2008, 9 April 2009.
6. Daniel Snowman, [http://www.historytoday.com/MainArticle.aspx?m=11011&amid=11011 "Lady Antonia Fraser"], ''[[History Today]]'' 50.10 (October 2000): pp. 26–28, ''History Today'', n.d., 8 April 2009 (excerpt; full article available to subscribers or pay-per-view customers).
7. Nicholas Wroe, [https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/aug/24/biography.academicexperts "Profile: The History Woman"], ''The Guardian'', Arts & Humanities, 24 August 2002; retrieved 8 April 2009.
8. [http://www.alumni.ox.ac.uk/featured_alumni/antonia_fraser.html "Featured Alumni: Antonia Fraser: Author, Lady Margaret Hall"] {{webarchive. link. (9 January 2010 , ''University of Oxford Alumni'', University of Oxford, 29 October 2007. Retrieved 17 June 2008.)
9. (11 January 2015). "Strictly Ballgown: Antonia Fraser remembers her debutante days".
10. link. (8 March 2009 and [http://www.antoniafraser.com/other_books.aspx "Other Books by Antonia Fraser"] {{Webarchive). link. (7 June 2009 at ''AntoniaFraser.com'', Antonia Fraser, 2007; retrieved 9 April 2009; [http://www.orionbooks.co.uk/8238-5/Author-Antonia-Fraser.htm "Author: Antonia Fraser: Non-Fiction"] {{webarchive). link. (20 November 2012 , ''Orion Books'', 2004–2007 [updated 2009], 9 April 2009.)
11. (23 August 2002). "The History Woman". The Guardian.
12. (2004-02-16). "Charles II: The Power and the Passion". BBC.
13. (15 August 2024). "The Oldie's new columnist, Lady Antonia Fraser, 91, remembers writing her first book 70 years ago – King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table". The Oldie.
14. "Board of Trustees".
15. [https://www.walterscottclub.com/1983-lady-antonia-fraser "Our President in 1983/84 was: Lady Antonia Fraser"], biography, ''[[Edinburgh]] Sir [[Walter Scott]] Club'', n.d. Retrieved 8 April 2009.
16. [http://www.francobritishsociety.org.uk/benefits.html "Benefits"], Franco-British Society, 2008. Retrieved 9 April 2009.
17. Alex Danchev, [http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=208075&sectioncode=22 "They Remember, But Others Forget"], ''[[Times Higher Education Supplement]]'', News Corporation, 2 March 2007. Retrieved 13 June 2008.
18. "Patrons, Presidents and Trustees".
19. [[Cf.]] ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20080529151956/http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/myword/ My Word!]'', BBC Radio 4, [[BBC]], 9 April 2009.
20. [https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/jun/09/antonia-fraser-harold-pinter-love-story "Antonia Fraser to tell Harold Pinter 'love story']. Historical biographer will publish her 'portrait of a marriage' to the Nobel laureate in January 2010", ''The Guardian'', 9 June 2009. Retrieved 19 June 2009. [There is a factual error in this account; the Pinter-Merchant marriage was not dissolved in 1977, as stated, but in 1980, shortly before Pinter and Fraser married; Merchant's delay in signing the divorce papers resulted in the reception (scheduled for Pinter's 50th birthday on 10 October 1980) being held before the wedding, which occurred two weeks later, according to [[Michael Billington (critic). Michael Billington]]'s authorised biography of Pinter (''Harold Pinter'', pp. 271–72). It was the Frasers' marital union that was dissolved in 1977.]
21. [https://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/07/obituaries/sir-hugh-fraser-dead-long-a-tory-legislator.html "Sir Hugh Fraser Dead; Long a Tory Legislator"], Obituaries, ''[[The New York Times]]'', 7 March 1984, 13 June 2008.
22. [https://www.channel4.com/history/microsites/H/history/t-z/year04.html "Timeline: 1974–75: The Year London Blew Up"], History, [[Channel 4]], 27 August 2007; retrieved 8 April 2009.
23. "Campden Hill Square area Pages 87–100 ''Survey of London'': Volume 37, Northern Kensington.". LCC 1973.
24. {{London Gazette. (31 December 2010)
25. (2023-09-01). "Antonia Fraser, Lady".
26. link. (23 November 2011 , British Library Manuscripts Catalogue, British Library, 1993– , 8 April 2009.)
27. "Website of St. Louis Literary Award".
28. Saint Louis University Library Associates. "Recipients of the Saint Louis Literary Award".
29. (July 2017)
30. [https://www.galaxynationalbookawards.com/prize_cat_nonfiction.asp?#Book5 ''Must You Go?''] {{webarchive. link. (21 November 2010 , Shortlist for Non-Fiction Book of The Year award category (Book 5), Galaxy National Book Awards, 2010. Retrieved 6 December 2010.)