Antonia fraser family tree

  • Discover the family tree of Antonia Fraser: British author and novelist, 6 children, 7 siblings, 2 spouses.
  • Antonia is the first child (of 8) of Frank Pakenham, Seventh Earl of Longford and his wife Elizabeth née Harman.
  • Fraser is the daughter of Frank Pakenham, 7th Earl of Longford (1905–2001), and his wife, Elizabeth Pakenham, Countess of Longford, née.

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    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

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    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 artighet 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-conformis

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    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:

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    Family Trees

    Mary Queen of Scots was my first love: the character, that is. She was my heroine from when I was eight years old, as a result of a book which I borrowed recurringly from the Oxford Public Library. I particularly fancied the idea of her child attendants, the Four Maries, and I rather think that I included myself as the Fifth Marie in my first version of her story, or even the little Mary herself, since there were no limits to my historical fantasy.

    Later the idea of the child queen seemed less interesting than that of the femme fatale, as I poured over Margaret Irwin’s sexy version of the Bothwell abduction scene in The Gay Galliard. Still later, I became interested in the way one woman’s story could be traced like a kingfisher, flashing through the political history of France and Scotland: until the bright bird was caught and made captive in England.

    In quite a different way Mary Queen of Scots, the biography, first published forty years ag

  • antonia fraser family tree