Antonia Fraser

Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser (; 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, and prior to his death in 2008 was also known as Lady Antonia Pinter.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.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.)"Non-Fiction: Author: Antonia Fraser" , Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009]; retrieved 9 April 2009.

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,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. she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents.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). 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,"Non-Fiction: Antonia Fraser: Author Q&A" , Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009]; retrieved 9 April 2009. St Mary's School, Ascot, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater.Nicholas Wroe, "Profile: The History Woman", The Guardian, Arts & Humanities, 24 August 2002; retrieved 8 April 2009."Featured Alumni: Antonia Fraser: Author, Lady Margaret Hall" , University of Oxford Alumni, University of Oxford, 29 October 2007. Retrieved 17 June 2008. 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.Antonia Fraser, "Antonia Fraser: Author Q&A" , Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009]. Retrieved 9 April 2009.

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)."History Books by Antonia Fraser", and "Other Books by Antonia Fraser" at AntoniaFraser.com, Antonia Fraser, 2007; retrieved 9 April 2009; "Author: Antonia Fraser: Non-Fiction" , Orion Books, 2004–2007 [updated 2009], 9 April 2009.

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. 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. 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.Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot , 2007, Antonia Fraser website; retrieved 13 June 2008.

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. Early publications included volumes on dolls and toys. Her first book was a volume about King Arthur, one edition of which was illustrated by her eldest daughter; it was written for a series for Marks and Spencer, as was a later volume about Robin Hood.

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."Our President in 1983/84 was: Lady Antonia Fraser", biography, Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club, n.d. Retrieved 8 April 2009. 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."Benefits", Franco-British Society, 2008. Retrieved 9 April 2009.Alex Danchev, "They Remember, But Others Forget", Times Higher Education Supplement, News Corporation, 2 March 2007. Retrieved 13 June 2008.

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!Cf. My Word!, BBC Radio 4, BBC, 9 April 2009. 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."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.] 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."Sir Hugh Fraser Dead; Long a Tory Legislator", Obituaries, The New York Times, 7 March 1984, 13 June 2008. 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 Provisional 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."Timeline: 1974–75: The Year London Blew Up", History, Channel 4, 27 August 2007; retrieved 8 April 2009.

In 1975 she began an affair with the playwright Harold Pinter, who was then married to the actress Vivien Merchant. In 1977, after she had been living with Pinter for two years, the Frasers' union was legally dissolved. Merchant spoke about her distress publicly to the press, which quoted her cutting remarks about her rival, but she resisted divorcing Pinter. In 1980, after Merchant signed divorce papers, Fraser and Pinter married in the Roman Catholic Church.Melanie McDonagh, "Mr. and Mrs. Pinter, At Home", The Tablet, 30 January 2010, p. 21. 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.Antonia Fraser, "Sofia's Choice", Vanity Fair, November 2006, Condé Nast Publications; retrieved 9 April 2009.

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.

Antonia Fraser

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