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Antonia Fraser

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Template:Short description Template:Use British English Template:Use dmy dates Template:Infobox writer

Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, Template:Post-nominals (Template:Née; born 27 August 1932) is a British author of history, novels, biographies and detective fiction. She is the widow of the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Harold Pinter (1930–2008), and prior to his death was also known as Lady Antonia Pinter.<ref name=Gussow>Mel Gussow, "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.</ref><ref name=Fraserstudy>Antonia Fraser, "Writer's Rooms: Antonia Fraser", Guardian, Culture: Books, Guardian Media Group, 13 June 2008; retrieved 8 April 2009. (Includes photograph of Antonia Fraser's study.)</ref><ref name=Orionbio>"Non-Fiction: Author: Antonia Fraser" Template:Webarchive, Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009]; retrieved 9 April 2009.</ref>

Family background and educationEdit

Fraser is the first-born of the eight children of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001) and his wife, Elizabeth, Countess of Longford, née Elizabeth Harman (1906–2002). As the daughter of an earl, she is accorded the courtesy title "Lady" and thus customarily addressed formally as "Lady Antonia".<ref name=Gussow/>

As a teenager,<ref name=Dougary>Ginny Dougary, "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, 5 July 2008, 9 April 2009.</ref> she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents.<ref name=Gussow/><ref name=Snowman>Daniel Snowman, "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).</ref> 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 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."<ref name=Dougary/>

She was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford,<ref name=Gussow/><ref name="Q&A1">"Non-Fiction: Antonia Fraser: Author Q&A" Template:Webarchive, Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009]; retrieved 9 April 2009.</ref> St Mary's School, Ascot, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater.<ref name=Dougary/><ref name=Wroe>Nicholas Wroe, "Profile: The History Woman", The Guardian, Arts & Humanities, 24 August 2002; retrieved 8 April 2009.</ref><ref name=LMHAlum>"Featured Alumni: Antonia Fraser: Author, Lady Margaret Hall" Template:Webarchive, University of Oxford Alumni, University of Oxford, 29 October 2007. Retrieved 17 June 2008.</ref> Prior to going to Oxford in 1950, she was a debutante in the London social season.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

CareerEdit

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.<ref name=Gussow/><ref name="Q&A">Antonia Fraser, "Antonia Fraser: Author Q&A" Template:Webarchive, Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009]. Retrieved 9 April 2009.</ref>

Her first major work, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, was Mary, Queen of Scots (1969), which was followed by several other biographies, including Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973).<ref name=Orionbio/><ref name=Orion>"History Books by Antonia Fraser", Template:Webarchive and "Other Books by Antonia Fraser" Template:Webarchive at AntoniaFraser.com, Antonia Fraser, 2007; retrieved 9 April 2009; "Author: Antonia Fraser: Non-Fiction" Template:Webarchive, Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009], 9 April 2009.</ref> Fraser won the Wolfson History Award in 1984 for The Weaker Vessel, a study of women's lives in 17th-century England.<ref name=Orion/> From 1988 to 1989, she was president of English PEN, and she chaired its Writers in Prison Committee.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

She also has written detective novels, the most popular involving a character named Jemima Shore, and they were adapted into the television series Jemima Shore Investigates, which aired in the UK in 1983.<ref name=Wroe/>

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."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> 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.<ref name=Orion/> The book was cited as an influence on the 2003 BBC/A&E mini-series, Charles II: The Power & the Passion, in a featurette on the DVD, by Rufus Sewell who played the title character.<ref>Template:Citation</ref> 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.<ref name=Orion/><ref name=AFdotcom>Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot Template:Webarchive, 2007, Antonia Fraser website; retrieved 13 June 2008.</ref>

Her biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001, 2002), 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).<ref name=FraserSofia/> She contemplated a biography of Queen Elizabeth I, but shelved the idea as this subject has already been extensively covered.<ref name=Orionbio/><ref name=Guardian/>

Related experienceEdit

Fraser was a contestant on the BBC Radio 4 panel game My Word!<ref name=MyWord>Cf. My Word!, BBC Radio 4, BBC, 9 April 2009.</ref> from 1979 to 1990.

From 1983 to 1984, she was president of Edinburgh's Sir Walter Scott Club.<ref name=WSCbio>"Our President in 1983/84 was: Lady Antonia Fraser", biography, Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club, n.d. Retrieved 8 April 2009.</ref> 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 (2001).<ref name=FBS>"Benefits", Franco-British Society, 2008. Retrieved 9 April 2009.</ref><ref name=Danchev>Alex Danchev, "They Remember, But Others Forget", Times Higher Education Supplement, News Corporation, 2 March 2007. Retrieved 13 June 2008.</ref>

Fraser is a vice-president of the London Library.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

MemoirEdit

Fraser's 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.<ref name=Guardian>"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's authorised biography of Pinter (Harold Pinter, pp. 271–72). It was the Frasers' marital union that was dissolved in 1977.]</ref>

Marriages and later lifeEdit

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.<ref name=NYTObit>"Sir Hugh Fraser Dead; Long a Tory Legislator", Obituaries, The New York Times, 7 March 1984, 13 June 2008.</ref> They had six children, including Rebecca Fraser and Flora Fraser.<ref name=Wroe/><ref name=NYTObit/>

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 an IRA car bomb placed under the wheels of his Jaguar, 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.<ref name=Dougary/><ref name=NYTObit/><ref>Template:Cite book</ref><ref name=timeline>"Timeline: 1974–75: The Year London Blew Up", History, Channel 4, 27 August 2007; retrieved 8 April 2009.</ref>

In 1975, she began an affair with playwright Harold Pinter, who was then married to the actress Vivien Merchant.<ref name=Gussow/><ref name=Wroe/> In 1977, after she had been living with Pinter for two years, the Frasers' union was legally dissolved.<ref name=Gussow/><ref name=Wroe/> Merchant spoke about her distress publicly to the press, which quoted her cutting remarks about her rival, but she resisted divorcing Pinter.<ref name=Gussow/><ref name=Wroe/> In 1980, after Merchant signed divorce papers, Fraser and Pinter married <ref name=Gussow/><ref name=Dougary/><ref name=Wroe/>in the Roman Catholic Church.<ref>Melanie McDonagh, "Mr. and Mrs. Pinter, At Home", The Tablet, 30 January 2010, p. 21.</ref> Harold Pinter died from cancer on 24 December 2008, aged 78.<ref name=Orionbio/>Template:See also

Fraser lives at Campden Hill Square,<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> 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.<ref name=Gussow/><ref name=Fraserstudy/><ref name=FraserSofia>Antonia Fraser, "Sofia's Choice", Vanity Fair, November 2006, Condé Nast Publications; retrieved 9 April 2009.</ref>

Fraser is a vice-president of the Royal Stuart Society.

HonoursEdit

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.<ref>Template:London Gazette</ref> She was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to literature.

The Lady Antonia Fraser Archive in the British LibraryEdit

Template:Further Lady Antonia Fraser's uncatalogued papers (relating to her "Early Writing", "Fiction", and "Non-Fiction") are on loan at the British Library.<ref name=Archive110B>Loan No. 110B/1–19: Lady Antonia Fraser Archive Template:Webarchive, British Library Manuscripts Catalogue, British Library, 1993– , 8 April 2009.</ref> Papers by and relating to Lady Antonia Fraser are also catalogued as part of the Harold Pinter Archive, which is part of its permanent collection of Additional Manuscripts.

AwardsEdit

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WorksEdit

<ref name=Orion/>Template:Expand list

Non-fiction worksEdit

  • Mary Queen of Scots (1969). Template:ISBN.
  • Dolls (1963)
  • A History of Toys (1966)
  • Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973);
  • 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; Template:ISBN.
  • 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, Template:ISBN.
    • Rpt. & updated edition, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007.
    • Also published as the Orion audio-book The Six Wives of Henry VIII (November 2006); Template:ISBN.
    • The illustrated edition is The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Illustrated Edition (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1996); Template:ISBN.
    • The first paperback edition is The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Mandarin, 1993); Template:ISBN.
    • The 1st American edition is entitled The Wives of Henry VIII (New York: Knopf, 1992); Template:ISBN.
  • The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (1996)
    • Also published as Faith and Treason: The Gunpowder Plot; Template:ISBN.
  • Marie Antoinette (2001); Template:ISBN
  • Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (2006); Template:ISBN.
  • Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter (2010), London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion Books); Template:ISBN.
    • 1st U.S. edition, New York: Nan A. Talese/Doubleday; Template:ISBN.
    • 1st paperback edition London: Phoenix, 2010; Template:ISBN
    • Also published in audio & digital editions) - "Shortlisted for Galaxy National Book Awards: Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2010."<ref name=GalaxyShortList>Must You Go? Template:Webarchive, Shortlist for Non-Fiction Book of The Year award category (Book 5), Galaxy National Book Awards, 2010. Retrieved 6 December 2010.</ref>
  • Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 (2013); Template:ISBN
  • My History. A Memoir of Growing Up (2015), New York:  Doubleday. Template:ISBN
  • Our Israeli Diary: Of That Time, Of That Place (2017); Template:ISBN
  • The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829 (2018); Template:ISBN
  • The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women (2021); Template:ISBN
  • Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023); Template:ISBN

Historical fictionEdit

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

Jemima Shore novelsEdit

  • 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)

EditorEdit

  • 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)

See alsoEdit

NotesEdit

Template:Reflist

Further readingEdit

Biographies and profilesEdit

Interviews and articlesEdit

External linksEdit

Template:Wolfson History Prize Winners Template:Portal bar Template:Authority control

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