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, and my mother was Unitarian up to the age of 20 when she abandoned it."[5]
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).[4][12] Fraser 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.[13]
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.[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.[15] 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.[12][16]
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 (2001).[19][20]
Fraser's 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.[22]
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."[23]
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 9 am when he left the house; the bomb exploded, killing the
cancer researcherGordon Hamilton Fairley. Fairley, a neighbour of the Frasers, had been walking his dog, when he noticed something amiss and stopped to examine the bomb.[5][24][25][26]
In 1975, she began an affair with playwright
Harold Pinter, who was then married to the actress
Vivien Merchant.[2][8] In 1977, after she had been living with Pinter for two years, the Frasers' union was legally dissolved.[2][8] Merchant spoke about her distress publicly to the press, which quoted her cutting remarks about her rival, but she resisted divorcing Pinter.[2][8] In 1980, after Merchant signed divorce papers, Fraser and Pinter married.[2][5][8] After the deaths of both their spouses, Fraser and Pinter were married by a Jesuit priest, Fr. Michael Campbell-Johnson, in the Roman Catholic Church.[27] Harold Pinter died from cancer on 24 December 2008, aged 78.[4]
Lady Antonia Fraser's uncatalogued papers (relating to her "Early Writing", "Fiction", and "Non-Fiction") are on loan at the
British Library.[30] Papers by and relating to Lady Antonia Fraser are also catalogued as part of the Harold Pinter Archive, which is part of its permanent collection of Additional Manuscripts.
^Daniel Snowman,
"Lady Antonia Fraser", History Today 50.10 (October 2000): pp. 26–28, History Today, n.d., 8 April 2009 (excerpt; full article available to subscribers or pay-per-view customers).
^
ab"Antonia Fraser to tell Harold Pinter 'love story'. Historical biographer will publish her 'portrait of a marriage' to the Nobel laureate in January 2010", The Guardian, 9 June 2009. Retrieved 19 June 2009. [There is a factual error in this account; the Pinter-Merchant marriage was not dissolved in 1977, as stated, but in 1980, shortly before Pinter and Fraser married; Merchant's delay in signing the divorce papers resulted in the reception (scheduled for Pinter's 50th birthday on 10 October 1980) being held before the wedding, which occurred two weeks later, according to
Michael Billington's authorised biography of Pinter (Harold Pinter, pp. 271–72). It was the Frasers' marital union that was dissolved in 1977.]
^Wroe, Nicholas (23 August 2002).
"The History Woman". The Guardian. Retrieved 2 January 2016.
^Must You Go?Archived 21 November 2010 at the
Wayback Machine, Shortlist for Non-Fiction Book of The Year award category (Book 5), Galaxy National Book Awards, 2010. Retrieved 6 December 2010.