The next time, she actually heard his "awesome baritone" when he boomed a vocal attack at an attendant for opening a door in the middle of a recital about Mary, Queen of Scots, at the National Portrait Gallery when his wife, actress Vivien Merchant, took the part of Mary, and Fraser (author of the bestselling history of the queen) read the narrative. He was conversing with actors Robert Shaw and Donald Pleasence, and though her companion's interest was directed at macho, red-headed Shaw, Fraser said thoughtfully: "I'll take the dark one." Dressed in a purple dress and a jacket adorned with purple flowers, she offers me tea and chocolate biscuits – brought by her housekeeper, who has been pushing a carpet sweeper up and down the hallway.Antonia Fraser first saw him across a crowded room at lunchtime in London. Nowadays it would be seen as sexist, but then I’d never even heard of the word.”įraser might come from aristocratic lineage – she grew up in Oxford and was the eldest child of the Earl of Longford and his historian wife, Elizabeth – but there is nothing haughty about her. “The other side,” she continues, “was a great friend of mine, also a writer and historian, saying, ‘You know, you write like a man,’ and I realised it was a great compliment.
But the remark, ‘What is a woman doing writing about Cromwell?’ I mean, I didn’t pay any attention.” Fraser, who is softly spoken and endearing, is talking to me from her drawing room in London’s Holland Park about inequality – the subject of her new book, The Case of the Married Woman. “I replied in a lecture that I was not middle-class or nice. “It said, ‘What does this nice middle-class woman know about the torments of Oliver Cromwell?’” recalls Fraser. When Fraser wrote her next book, a biography of Oliver Cromwell, in 1973, she received one particularly presumptuous review. But it wasn’t always so rosy for her as a female writer. Being a young woman, with my white mini skirt and false blonde hair, seemed rather an advantage when I wrote Mary, Queen of Scots,” says 88-year-old Antonia Fraser, the historian and widow of Harold Pinter, talking candidly about her first bestseller in 1969.
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