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Lady Antonia Fraser 

Antonia Fraser
Born Antonia Margaret Caroline Pakenham
27 August 1932 (1932-08-27) (age 76)
London, England
Nationality Flag of the United Kingdom British
Writing period 1969–
Genres biography, detective fiction
Spouse(s) Harold Pinter (1980– )
Hugh Fraser (1956–1977)
Children six (with Fraser)
Official website

Lady Antonia Fraser, CBE (born 27 August 1932), née Pakenham, is an English author of history and novels, best known as Antonia Fraser for writing biographies and detective fiction. She is the second wife of Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, and is also known as Antonia Pinter.[1][2][3]

Contents

Biography

Family background and education

Born on 27 August 1932, and named Antonia Margaret Caroline Pakenham, Antonia Fraser is the daughter of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), and his wife, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, née Elizabeth Harman (1906–2002); thus, her formal title (form of address) is "Lady Antonia".[1] When she was a teenager,[4] like all her siblings, she became a convert to the Catholic Church, after the conversion of her parents.[1][5] 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, she has explained, "My father was Protestant Church of Ireland and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20, when she abandoned it."[4] She was educated at St Mary's School Ascot, Ascot and Dragon School, Oxford,[1][6] and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, also her mother's alma mater.[4][7][8]

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 15 years her senior and a Conservative Unionist MP in the House of Commons (sitting for Stafford), who was a friend of the American Kennedy family.[9] They had six children: three sons, Benjamin, Damian, and Orlando; and three daughters, Rebecca, Flora, and Natasha (Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni), who are all also writers and biographers.[9][7] Benjamin works for JPMorgan, Damian is the managing director of the investment banking firm UBS AG (formerly S. G. Warburg) in Mexico, and Orlando is a barrister specializing in commercial law (Wroe).[7] Lady Antonia has 17 grandchildren.[4]

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 9am when he left the house; the bomb exploded prematurely when it was examined and inadvertently set off by the eminent cancer researcher Gordon Hamilton-Fairley (1930–1975), a neighbor of the Frasers, who had been walking his dog, noticed and inspected the device under the car, and died as a result of the blast.[4][9][10]

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.[1][7] In 1977, after she had been living with Pinter for two years, the Frasers' union was legally dissolved.[1][7] Merchant spoke about her distress publicly to the press, which quoted her cutting remarks about her rival, but she resisted divorcing Pinter.[1][7] In 1980, after Merchant signed divorce papers, Fraser and Pinter married.[1][4][7]

See also: Harold Pinter#Marriage and family life

They live in Holland Park, near Notting Hill Gate, in the Fraser family home, where she still writes in her fourth-floor study.[1][3][11]

Career

She 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.[1][6]

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)[12], along with a short biography, is listed in her Orion author's webpage,[13] She won the Wolfson History Award in 1984 for The Weaker Vessel, a study of women's lives in 17th century England.[12] From 1988 to 1989, she was president of English PEN, and she chaired its Writers in Prison Committee.citations needed

She also has written detective novels; the most popular involved a character named Jemima Shore were adapted into a television series which aired in the UK in 1983.[7]

In 1983 to 1984, she was president of the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.[14]

More recently, Fraser published The Warrior Queens, the story of various military royal women since the days of Boadicea and Cleopatra.[2] 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 in his study of Ann Boleyn.[15]

She chronicled the life and times of Charles II in a well-reviewed 1979 eponymous biography.[12] 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.citations needed 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, 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.[12][16]

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).[11]

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.citations needed

She serves as a judge for the Enid McLeod Literary Prize, awarded by the Franco-British Society, having won that prize herself for her biography Marie Antoinette (2001).[17][18]

Correcting those who notice only her physical beauty – remarked upon both in her youth and well into her seventh decade – some readers and audience members of her talks have stressed that she is "more than just a pretty face" but actually an accomplished historian and "an intellectual".[19]

Awards

Selected bibliography

(Sources: [12][22])

Non-Fiction works

Jemima Shore novels

Anthologies

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

See also

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Mel Gussow, "The Lady Is a Writer", The New York Times Magazine, Health sec., September 9, 1984, accessed June 13, 2008.
  2. ^ a b Eleanor O'Donnell, "Author Profiles: Introducing Lady Antonia Fraser", helium.com, accessed June 13, 2008.
  3. ^ a b Antonia Fraser, "Writer's Rooms: Antonia Fraser", The Guardian, Culture: Books, accessed June 13, 2008. (Includes photograph.)
  4. ^ a b c d e f 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, timesonline.co.uk, July 5, 2008, accessed July 5, 2008.
  5. ^ Daniel Snowman, "Lady Antonia Fraser", History Today 50.10 (October 2000): 26-28 (excerpt; full article available to subscribers or pay-per-view customers).
  6. ^ a b Antonia Fraser: Q&A at Orion Publishing Group (UK publisher), accessed August 25, 2007.
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h Nicholas Wroe, "Profile: The History Woman", The Guardian, August 24, 2002, Arts & Humanities, accessed June 13, 2008.
  8. ^ "Featured Alumni: Antonia Fraser: Author, Lady Margaret Hall", University of Oxford, alumni.ox.ac.uk, last updated October 29, 2007, accessed June 17, 2008.
  9. ^ a b c "Sir Hugh Fraser Dead; Long a Tory Legislator", The New York Times, March 7, 1984, Obituaries, accessed June 13, 2008.
  10. ^ "Timeline: 1974-75: The Year London Blew Up", Channel 4, website feature, accessed August 27, 2007.
  11. ^ a b Antonia Fraser, "Sofia's Choice", Vanity Fair, Nov. 2006, accessed June 13, 2008.
  12. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Her bibliography of works published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (Orion Publishing Group)
  13. ^ "Antonia Fraser", Publisher's page on Fraser, as well as in her own official website, antoniafraser.com.
  14. ^ "Our President in 1983/84 was: Lady Antonia Fraser", biography, Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club (Club official website), accessed January 5, 2008.
  15. ^ 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).
  16. ^ Antonia Fraser, The Gunpowder Plot, antoniafraser.com, accessed June 13, 2008.
  17. ^ "Benefits", francobritishsociety.org.uk, accessed June 13, 2008.
  18. ^ a b Alex Danchev, "They Remember, But Others Forget", Times Higher Education Supplement, March 2, 2007, accessed June 13, 2008.
  19. ^ Sam Leith, "Literary Lazing", Daily Telegraph, Arts blogs, July 10, 2007, accessed June 13, 2008.
  20. ^ "Gold Daggers", Crime Writers' Association official site, thecwa.co.uk, accessed June 13, 2008.
  21. ^ "Enid McLeod Literary Prize", Book Trust, booktrustdev.org.uk, accessed June 13, 2008.
  22. ^ Antonia Fraser, Offical website >History Books, >Other Books, antoniafraser.com, accessed June 13, 2008.

Selected references

Biographies and profiles
Interviews and interview-based articles
Timelines

External links
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