Antonia Fraser

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Antonia Fraser

Nationality Flag of the United Kingdom English
Writing period 1969–
Genres biography, detective fiction
Spouse(s) Hugh Fraser (1956–1977)
Harold Pinter (1980– )
Official website

Lady Antonia Fraser (Pinter), CBE (born August 27, 1932, as Antonia Margaret Caroline Pakenham) is a British author of history and novels, best known as Antonia Fraser for writing biographies and detective fiction, and the second wife of Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Personal life

The daughter of the late Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford, and his wife, the late Elizabeth Harman, Fraser's title (form of address) is "Lady Antonia". Like all her siblings, she became a child convert to the Catholic Church, after the conversion of her parents. She was educated at St Mary's School Ascot, Ascot and Dragon School, Oxford,[1] and was graduated from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, also her mother's alma mater.

In 1956, she married Scottish Catholic aristocrat and MP Sir Hugh Fraser (1918-1984), a Conservative Unionist MP in the House of Commons, sitting for Stafford. During her marriage to him, which ended in 1977, they had three sons, Benjamin, Damian, and Orlando, and three daughters, Rebecca, Flora, and Natasha. Rebecca, Flora, and Natasha (as Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni) are writers and biographers. Benjamin works for JPMorgan. Damian is the managing director of the investment banking firm UBS AG (formerly S. G. Warburg) in Mexico. Orlando is a barrister specializing in commercial law. Lady Antonia has 16 grandchildren.

On October 22, 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 9am when he left the house; the bomb exploded prematurely when it was examined and accidentally set off by a passerby, the respected cancer researcher Dr Gordon Hamilton-Fairley, who was walking his dog. Hamilton-Fairley died. [2]

In 1975, Antonia Fraser met and began an affair with playwright Harold Pinter, who was then married to the actress Vivien Merchant, resulting in fodder for the British tabloid newspapers. 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. They still live in the Fraser family home, in Holland Park. In some social circumstances, she uses her married name "Antonia Pinter".[citation needed]

[edit] Career

Antonia Fraser's first major work was Mary, Queen of Scots (1969). Following that book, she published several 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 89, and was Chairman of its Writers in Prison Committee.

She also 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.

In 1983–1984 she was president of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.[3]

More recently, Fraser published The Warrior Queens, the story of various 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, which British historian Eric Ives cites as the more impartial account.[4]

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 has also served as the editor for many monarchical biographies, including those featured in the Kings and Queens of England and Royal History of England series. Fraser later published The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605.

Two of the most recent of her thirteen non-fiction books are Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001, 2002), which has been made into 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).

From 1979 to 1990 she was a panelist on the BBC Radio 4 panel game My Word!, taking the chair for one season in 1983.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Non-Fiction works

  • Mary, Queen of Scots (1969). ISBN 0-385-31129-X.
  • King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1970)
  • Dolls (1973).
  • Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973); also published as Cromwell: The Lord Protector. ISBN 0-8021-3766-0.
  • King James VI and I (1974).
  • The Lives of the Kings and Queens of England [Editor] (1975).
  • King Charles II (1979); also published as Royal Charles: Charles II and the Restoration and Charles II. ISBN 0-7538-1403-X.
  • The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in Seventeenth-century England (1984).
  • The Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot (1988); also published as Warrior Queens: The Legends and Lives of Women Who Have Lead Their Nations in War.
  • The Six Wives of Henry VIII. (1999; rpt. & updated ed. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2007). ISBN 029764355X (10). ISBN 9780297643555 (13). Also published as the Orion audio-book The Six Wives of Henry VIII (Nov. 2006). ISBN 0752889133. The first paperback ed. is The Six Wives of Henry VIII (London: Mandarin, 1993). ISBN 0749314095 (10); ISBN 978-0749314095 (13). The 1st American ed. is entitled The Wives of Henry VIII. New York: Knopf, 1992. ISBN 0394585380 (10); ISBN 978-0394585383 (13).
  • The Gunpowder Plot: Terror and Faith in 1605 (1996); also published as Faith and Treason: The Gunpowder Plot. ISBN 0-385-47189-0.
  • Marie Antoinette (2001). ISBN 0-385-48949-8. Also published as Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2002). ISBN 0-753-82140-0 (10). ISBN 978-075-382140-4 (13).
  • Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King (2006). ISBN 0-297-82997-1.

[edit] Jemima Shore novels

[edit] Anthologies

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

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Antonia Fraser: Q&A at Orion Publishing Group (UK publisher), accessed August 25, 2007.
  2. ^ "Timeline: 1974-75: The Year London Blew Up", Channel 4, website feature, accessed August 27, 2007.
  3. ^ "Our President in 1983/84 was: Lady Antonia Fraser", biography, Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club (Club official website), accessed January 5, 2008.
  4. ^ Eric W. Ives, The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn, rev. ed. (1986; London: Blackwell's, 2004) xvii. ISBN 0631234799 (10). ISBN 978-0631234791 (13).

[edit] References

[edit] External links