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A Life in Books
A LIFE IN BOOKS
From Agatha Christie to serious history, and a building in St James’s Square: the acclaimed writer and biographer Lady Antonia Fraser tells Lara Feigel about her love affair with the written word
Photography by Pål Hansen
The circumstances of Lady Antonia Fraser’s first foray into The London Library speak eloquently of her family dynamics. Her father was Francis Pakenham, the 7th Earl of Longford and a government minister under Clement Attlee, and he had sent her to return his books. He couldn’t do it himself, he said, because they were so late, but she was youthful and charming enough to be forgiven. She’d also need to be forgiven for his furious pencil annotations – in contrast, Fraser herself is a very light annotator of books she owns and lives in fear of accidentally marking one from the Library.
She could not have known then that she would one day become a Library Vice-President, but when she walked into the lobby from St James’s Square, it was love at first sight and she would soon be a member. Here she would find many of the books that would enable her to become the prize-winning author of more than 20 works of history and biography that are now much-borrowed from the Library’s shelves.
The combination of capability and haplessness in his instructions was typical of Fraser’s father. He was a major political figure (at one point during his years as a Labour minister, Fraser wrote grandly in her diary that he was going to “abolish Want”), but was incapable of keeping his buttons done up or making a cup of tea. Fraser describes her mother, a practically minded socialist feminist, as the “paterfamilias”, and it was she who carved the joints, drove the car and taught Fraser to read.
Their Oxford house was full of books – many from libraries. One in particular, H E Marshall’s Our Island Story: A Child’s History of England (1905) shaped Fraser’s childhood and provided her first encounter with her later biographical subjects, who have included Mary, Queen of Scots and Oliver Cromwell. Aged four, she read tales of martyrdom and courage that transformed 1930s Oxford into the landscape of the past. She was gripped by the story of Empress Matilda, a claimant to the 12th-century English throne. Walking past Oxford Prison, Fraser imagined herself as Matilda, dressed in white, escaping imprisonment by skating across the icy river.
Fraser was the oldest of eight children, so home was cheerfully chaotic, and she was grateful to have her own attic bedroom (“a cell in dimensions, but my own cell”). In it, she devoured history books but also became a rapacious reader of crime fiction and the historical romances of Georgette Heyer. “There comes a point in every friendship when I say: ‘Either you think Georgette Heyer is the greatest writer who ever lived or our relationship is over’,” she says, sitting on her sofa with me in the Notting Hill house where she brought up her six children and lived for 30 years with the playwright Harold Pinter.
Fraser's most recent book, published last year, explores the Victorian writers Caroline Norton, who campaigned for women's divorce and custody rights (Orion)
Fraser in 1969, at her home in Holland Park, with the first edition of Mary Queen of Scots.
Photo: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy
She asks if I like Heyer, and I have to admit I have never read her. Luckily, I am not evicted from the sofa. I am saved, perhaps, by having made friends with Fraser’s affectionate black-and-white cat Bella, who spends the interview moving between our laps, settling at points on my page of questions (apparently instructed by her mistress to do so).
Heyer was deemed appropriate reading by Fraser’s mother, but other popular writers were not. Enid Blyton and Barbara Cartland were banned, though Fraser secretly raided their cook’s stash of Cartlands. Later Fraser would define happiness as “arriving at Inverness airport and finding an Agatha Christie you haven’t read before”, and unhappiness as “finding one you had read before but that had been given a different title”.
There was weightier reading, too. She discovered Anthony Trollope, falling for Lady Glencora Palliser, his “tiny tousle-haired heiress”. And there was the Bible. Her father converted to Catholicism in 1940 and the rest of the family followed. He was never without a copy of the New Testament and they would all read Psalms, which she still loves (each child had to learn a verse to get their pocket money).
She enjoyed English lessons at school – first, a boys’ prep school in Oxford (at which she was among a handful of girls), followed by a boarding school and then a convent – but was most enthusiastic about theatrical texts: she loved playing Lady Macbeth. History remained her great passion, but her mother told her to put down PPE on her university application, despite Fraser not knowing what it was. A scholarship was forthcoming, but when she finally found out it would involve studying philosophy and economics, she was horrified. Thankfully, she was allowed to transfer.
This combination of obedience and faithfulness to her own ideals is typical. I find during our interview that she is wonderfully, almost conspiratorially, compliant, but also that she directs very precisely what is said. This seems to connect to her voracity as a reader: somehow she has always managed to combine loyalty to family traditions with a willingness to follow her own desires.
Her two marriages were both filled with books. Her first husband, Hugh Fraser, was a Conservative politician, so she tended to read alone while he was at the House of Commons. With Pinter, whom she met in the mid-1970s and married in 1980, reading was part of their shared intimacy, except in the heady days of their first trip to Paris. She noted with amazement in her diary: “There is something very odd about the time we have spent together. I haven’t read a book. This is the first time probably since I learnt to read.” But they quickly settled in to reading together, with her on the sofa where we are sitting and him on the chair (now gone), to which she gestures several times during our conversation, conjuring him as a presence (he died in 2008). They read separate books, pausing to read passages aloud or even entire plays, including his works in progress.
Following the success of her first major work, Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1969, she continued to research and write biographies of historical figures, including King Charles II and the wives of Henry VIII. But she also began to write crime fiction. Her first Jemima Shore novel was set in the convent where Fraser had gone to school, and Shore herself was portrayed as a writer of Fraser’s age in an affair with a married man, which mirrored aspects of her early days with Pinter. Now she wonders about writing a final Jemima Shore novel, in which Dame Jemima is in her 80s (Fraser is 89) and solves mysteries with the sharpness and charm of her creator.
It is clear that Fraser will continue to write for as long as she can, and that she reads as hungrily as ever. She is pleased with her Kindle, which enables her to have the complete works of Agatha Christie and of Dickens with her at all times, and has just finished rereading Great Expectations. When not writing, she campaigns to promote a love of reading as patron of the Give a Book charity.
Our interview is followed by lunch, which Fraser would share with Pinter every day in the double-windowed dining room. In those days she would rush down with the chapter she had just written and present it to him exuberantly, hopeful that it was the best historical writing since Macaulay. He would read it and assure her that it was, while noting that she had used the word “sanguine” 45 times. “He adored the English language, he didn’t know history, and he was always encouraging – I miss it most terribly,” she says.
I am not invited to read the chapter she wrote on the morning of our interview, but I am permitted into the study where it was composed. It’s another dual-aspect room at the top of the house, full of pictures, with desks at each end piled high with books from Fraser’s beloved London Library. For years she scoured the shelves, and was especially impressed by the collection on the French Revolution, sometimes pausing to sit in the Reading Room. Now she gets books posted, and finds the speed with which they arrive remarkable. “I couldn’t imagine life without it,” she says. •
Lara Feigel is a Professor of Modern Literature and Culture at King’s College London and is the author of five works of cultural history and one novel, The Group. Her new book, Look! We Have Come Through! – Living With D H Lawrence is out in August
ANTONIA FRASER’S GREATEST HITS
Brilliant books from across her career
MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS (1969)
Fraser’s first major biography was an international hit and awarded the 1969 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In The New York Review, the respected historian and reviewer John Kenyon wrote, perhaps not entirely in jest: “Lady Antonia Fraser is young, beautiful, and rich, an earl’s daughter married to a busy and successful politician, the mother of a large family; yet she has surmounted all these handicaps to authorship to produce a first-rate historical biography.”
THE GUNPOWDER PLOT: TERROR AND FAITH IN 1605 (1996)
Fraser’s account of the attempted terrorism at the Houses of Parliament in 1605 is approached with her usual storytelling flair, boasting “a sense of pace and tension worthy of a John le Carré novel” according to The Sunday Telegraph. Covering one of England’s most famous historical episodes, facts about which are remarkably shaky, it was awarded the St Louis Literary Award and the Crime Writers’ Association Non-Fiction Gold Dagger.
THE WEAKER VESSEL: WOMAN’S LOT IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND (1984)
Departing from her lives of famous figures, this ambitious social history looked at midwives, courtesans, abbesses and more. Fraser was inspired to begin research in the 1970s, while working on her Oliver Cromwell biography, and drew on varied contemporary sources, from diaries to legal documents. Among the earliest mainstream books to piece together unwritten women’s stories, it was awarded the 1984 Wolfson History Prize.
MARIE ANTOINETTE: THE JOURNEY (2001)
A famous line about cake is only one of the untruths that Fraser aims to redress in this biography of the last queen of the Ancien Régime, who came to the throne aged 14. The book was adapted into a film by Sofia Coppola in 2006, focusing on the monarch’s dreamy teendom and seen today as a cult classic. The director said “I wanted to adapt Antonia Fraser’s book because her attitude was so different from other biographies about Marie.”
