Literary Birthday – 27 August – Antonia Fraser

Happy Birthday, Antonia Fraser, born on 27 August 1932.

Antonia Fraser Quotes

1. Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.
2. People in my books tend to get their just desserts, even if not at the hands of the police.
3. My advantage as a woman and a human being has been in having a mother who believed strongly in women’s education. She was an early undergraduate at Oxford, and her own mother was a doctor.
4. I think crime writing is my link with trying to preserve a sort of order.
5. The clue to book jacket photography is to look friendly and approachable, but not too glamorous.

Antonia Fraser is an Anglo-Irish author of history, novels, biographies, and detective fiction. Her bestselling books include Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, and The Six Wives of Henry VIII. Fraser was made CBE in 1999, was awarded the Norton Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2000, elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2003, and made a DBE in 2010. She is the widow of the playwright Harold Pinter. Fraser’s first memoir Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter was published in 2010. Her second memoir, My History. A Memoir of Growing Up was published a few years later. She was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2018 New Year Honours for services to literature.

Source for Image: englishpen, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Antonia_Fraser.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
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