Profile of Antonia Fraser on Famous Like Me

The Lady Antonia Fraser (born August 27, 1932) is a British author of history and novels, best known for writing biographies. She is the daughter of the Earl and Countess of Longford, who were both eminent writers, Labour supporters and Catholic converts. Their eight children became child converts to the Roman Catholic Church. As the daughter of an Earl, Antonia Fraser is entitled to the title "Lady."

Life and Career

Lady Antonia was educated at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. Her first major work was Mary, Queen of Scots (1969). She followed it up with various other biographies, including Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973). She won the Wolfson History Award in 1984 for The Weaker Vessel, a study of women's lives in 17th century England. She was President of English PEN from 1988 to 99, and was Chairman of its Writers in Prison Committee.

In addition, she writes detective novels, with the most popular involving a character named Jemima Shore. A television series based on these stories was aired in the UK in 1983.

More recently, Lady Antonia published Warrior Queens, the story of various military royal women since the days of Boadicea and Cleopatra. In 1992 she published The Six Wives of Henry VIII. It was published only a year after Alison Weir's book of the same title, though academics felt that Fraser's work was the more impartial.

Fraser later published The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605. Her most recent work is an acclaimed and in-depth biography of France's last legitimate queen, Marie Antoinette. Marie-Antoinette: The Journey is apparently being adapted for film by Sofia Coppola, with the title role being played by Kirsten Dunst.

Personal Life

In 1956, Lady Antonia married Sir Hugh Fraser, a Roman Catholic MP when she found out she was pregnant with his child. They had three sons (Benjamian, Damian and Orlando) and three daughters (Rebecca, Flora and Natasha). Sir Hugh was a Conservative Unionist MP in the House of Commons, sitting for Stafford.

Sir Hugh and Lady Fraser, together with Caroline Kennedy who was visiting at the time, were almost blown up by an IRA car bomb on 23rd October 1975 but the bomb exploded prematurely. Unfortunately another motorist, the well-respected cancer researcher Dr. Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, died instead.

As a Roman Catholic, Lady Antonia caused a public scandal in 1977 by leaving her husband for playwright Harold Pinter. Pinter's then-wife, the actress Vivien Merchant, spoke publicly of her distress at his abandonment of her and made cutting remarks about Fraser in the press, including the famous comment that "she has very big feet".

Fraser and Pinter married in 1980, when Pinter and Merchant's divorce was finalized, and they lived in Holland Park, west London. One of Lady Antonia's daughters, Flora Fraser, is an historical biographer.

Bibliography

Non Fiction Works

• Mary, Queen of Scots (1969)
• King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1970)
• Dolls (1973)
• Cromwell: our Chief of Men (1973)
• King James VI and I
• The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England
• Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration (published in Britain as Charles II)
• The Weaker Vessel (1984)
• Boadicea's Chariot: Warrior Queens (1988)
• The Six Wives of Henry VIII (1992)
• Faith and Treason : The Story of the Gunpowder Plot (1996)
• Marie-Antoinette: The Journey (2002)

Jemima Shore Series

• Quiet as a Nun (1977)
• The Wild Island (1978)
• 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)

Anthologies

• Scottish Love Poems (1975)
• Love Letters (1976)

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