Antonia Fraser

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". she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents. 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." St Mary's School, Ascot, and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; the last was also her mother's alma mater. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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). 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. 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. 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! 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. 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. They had six children, including Rebecca Fraser and Flora Fraser. In 1975 she began an affair with the playwright Harold Pinter, who was then married to the actress Vivien Merchant. Harold Pinter died of cancer on 24 December 2008, aged 78. 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. ==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. ==Archives==

Fraser's uncatalogued papers (relating to her "Early Writing", "Fiction" and "Non-Fiction") are on loan at the British Library. Papers by and relating to Fraser are also catalogued as part of the Harold Pinter Archive, which is part of its permanent collection of Additional Manuscripts. ==Awards==

• James Tait Black Memorial Prize (1969), for her book Mary, Queen of Scots. • St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. • Historical Association Norton Medlicott Medal (2000). ==Works==

• Perilous Question: The Drama of the Great Reform Bill 1832 (2013); • My History. A Memoir of Growing Up (2015), New York:  Doubleday. • Our Israeli Diary: Of That Time, Of That Place (2017); • The King and the Catholics: The Fight for Rights, 1829 (2018); • The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women (2021); • Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023); Historical fiction • King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table (1954) • Robin Hood (1955) Jemima Shore novels • 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) Editor • 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 also==