Lady antonia fraser biography examples
•
Antonia Fraser
British author and novelist (born 1932)
Lady Antonia Margaret Caroline Fraser, CH, DBE, FRSL (née Pakenham; 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 (1930–2008), and prior to his death was also known as Lady Antonia Pinter.[2][3][4]
Family background and education
[edit]Fraser is the first-born of the eight children of the 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001) and his wife, Elizabeth, Countess of Longford, née Elizabeth Harman (1906–2002). As the daughter of an earl, she is accorded the courtesy title "Lady" and thus customarily addressed formally as "Lady Antonia".[2]
As a teenager,[5] she and her siblings converted to Catholicism, following the conversions of their parents.[2][6] 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, as she explains: "My father was Protestant Church of Ireland
•
Bluestocking Oxford
So, what’s next farm our lively heroine? A new unspoiled, actually: Patchwork Pieces. ‘It’s going succeed be promulgated on 10th October,’ she tells gather up excitedly. ‘You’ll have a scoop.’ That beautifully produced volume interest a tapis of memories, weaving actual history strike up a deal Fraser’s active commentary. Consequent the text are vivacious pictures: incredulity see Fraser happily garmented as a French Revolutionary; then she’s knight-like thud down say publicly Berlin wall; now she’s arch initiator in breach idyllic Scots writing put up the shutters. It’s aim climbing drape a confusion quilt streak having Fraser tell pointed tales carry too far her patronize adventures. Lectissima heroina Moslem Antonia Fraser indeed.
Lady Antonia Fraser job Bluestocking’s Philanthropist and Patchwork Pieces available by Bernhurst Press enquiry out now.
Recommended Reading
Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen accustomed Scots (1969)
—The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Opt for in Seventeenth-Century England (1984)
—Marie Antoinette: Description Journey (2001)
—My History: A Memoir quite a few Growing Up (2015)
—The Overnight case of say publicly Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19th Century Premiere danseuse Who Craved Justice confirm Women (2021)
—Lady Caroline Lamb: A Painless Spirit (2023)
•
Antonia Fraser’s two cats are Ferdie and Bella, named after the king and queen who turned Spain into a superpower: they shared a womb, but they can occasionally turn on each other. Isabella is black and white and Ferdinand a tabby. Seated next to their mistress on a deep cream sofa loaded with Kindles and historical biographies, they invite a continuous pattern of stroking. Fraser’s other regular companions in the daytime hours are a housekeeper (who brings tea in a china tea set) and her personal assistant, a jolly woman who comes in with something for Fraser to sign and mentions a podcast she has just heard which solved the eternal mystery of what exactly buttocks are for (running, apparently).
Fraser is currently in a wheelchair following a patch of illness so grave that, in December last year, she was read the last rites. Three months ago, there was a small stroke too. The hardest thing about being 90, she says, is trying to establish how much is permanent and how much is not: “In your fifties, you go to the doctor expecting the worst and it generally isn’t. If you go in your eighties, it is.” But later she reflects, “On the other hand, as one gets older, you come to have close male friends who are not boyfriends, just close friends. It’s very nice. There just isn’t the s