Antonia Fraser: I was once told, ‘You write like a man.’ I took it as a compliment

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. But it wasn’t always so rosy for her as a female writer.

When Fraser wrote her next book, a biography of Oliver Cromwell, in 1973, she received one particularly presumptuous review. “It said, ‘What does this nice middle-class woman know about the torments of Oliver Cromwell?’” recalls Fraser. “I replied in a lecture that I was not middle-class or nice. 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. “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. Nowadays it would be seen as sexist, but then I’d never even heard of the word.”

Fraser 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. 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.

Perhaps unusually for a historian, Fraser has a long line of hits. Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001) was adapted into the 2006 film by director Sofia Coppola, starring Kirsten Dunst. “I loved it – there’s a moment when you get a shot of a pair of trainers, which really made me laugh,” chuckles Fraser, who let Coppola get on with her own “original creation”.

Fraser’s latest subject matter – and her 27^th book – is far less notorious. But she still immerses you in the saga of the “exotic-looking” Caroline Norton, who eventually became a 19th-century campaigner for women’s rights. Her husband, the MP George Norton, accused her of “adultery” with the widowed prime minister, Lord Melbourne. He took Melbourne to court, suing him for damages in a showy trial. But despite both his wife and Melbourne being acquitted, Norton’s husband legally denied her access to her three young children and took her income as an author. The copyrights of a married woman belonged to her husband.  

As Fraser points out, “most people would have just collapsed” – but Norton didn’t. She fought for reform; her first victory was the 1839 Infant Custody Act, which gave a mother the right of access to her own children. “She was determined it wouldn’t happen to anyone else. All the time, she keeps saying she’s acting for all women.”

Fraser, who was “flabbergasted” about the restrictions on married women in the mid-Victorian era, says: “I think any mother – you don’t have to be a writer – can absolutely quiver with horror at the way her children were taken away from her.”

Norton went on to campaign to bring in the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act that reformed the laws on divorce. The Married Women’s Property Act in 1870, which allowed a wife to own her own property and keep her wages, owes much to “Norton’s example”.

Fraser split from her first husband, the Conservative MP Sir Hugh Fraser, when she began an affair with Pinter in 1975. Does she feel an affinity with Norton? “We were both mothers and writers who used the money from writing to support ourselves. Otherwise, my story is completely different because my split from my first husband was amicable. We remained getting along very well. And then unlike poor Caroline, I had 33 very happy years with Harold. There’s only a superficial similarity.”

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Fraser, who has lived at her house for just over 61 years, has six children, 20 grandchildren, and two cats – Ferdey and Bella. Two of her children were born here, and in 1975, her first husband narrowly escaped death just outside the house, when an IRA car bomb exploded under the wheels of his Jaguar. It’s also where Pinter lived until his death in 2008.

“Do you mind going to the loo? It’s absolutely stuffed with pictures,” says Fraser – who sends me off to look at her 1980 wedding photograph to Pinter. The playwright is very much present in spirit; she points to his former “super-study” – a house on the next street that once had an entrance via her garden.

Pinter helped Fraser with her writing. “He was the most wonderful critic and not very surprisingly, had an incredible ear for language,” says Fraser. “Let’s say I got obsessed with the word ‘sanguine’ and used it three times, he’d spot it immediately. He’d also say things like, ‘Who’s Robespierre? [Maximilien Robespierre – a key figure in the 1789 French Revolution]’ and I would say, “Everyone knows who Robespierre is.’ And he would say, ‘Well, I don’t.’”

Did she help him with his plays? “I don’t think anyone helped Harold with his plays. I would never claim that.”

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But when Pinter had written them, he used to enact them to Fraser – “very often standing there in front of the fireplace”.

“One for the Road ends with the death of a child, and I remember not being able to sleep all night after he’d enacted it,” she fondly recalls.

I ask Fraser if it was love at first sight.  She calls her assistant and asks her to fetch me a copy of Must You Go? – her 2010 memoir of her life with Pinter.

Fraser and Pinter’s relationship was passionate and intense – and the book is based on diaries she kept. Its title stems from the moment Pinter looked at Fraser with his “extraordinary dark eyes” and said, “Must you go?” She had only zipped over to say “hello” before leaving a London theatre after a performance of his play, The Birthday Party, in 1975.

“And I thought, ‘Take children to school, shopping at Sainsbury’s, writing the life of Charles II.’ No, it’s not absolutely essential. If I’d said, ‘Oh alas, I’m afraid I must go,’ there’s no way I’d ever have seen Harold. Do I believe in destiny? I believe in luck.”

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When Pinter died, writing the memoir was her “grief therapy”. “I’d had a condolence lunch with an old friend a month after he died – and he said, ‘Antonia, do you still keep a diary?’ I thought, ‘That’s it. That is what I’m going to do.’ And I said, ‘Thank you very much for lunch. You really have been extremely kind. I’m afraid I must go.’ I rushed out and started writing it.” She can’t imagine what it would be like if she hadn’t. “All the time I was reliving it but also preserving it.”

Prior to going to Oxford University in 1950, Fraser was a debutante in the London social season, when young women – typically aristocrats – were formally presented to society, often at a debutant ball, before attending a series of social functions, where they might meet potential husbands. “I insisted on bringing myself out,” she says about the ritual. “Although my mother, as the wife of a Labour Minister, didn’t approve.”

“It wasn’t very serious – but yes I think it must have been a huge strain for some. I was just interested by the world – like history – I’m very inquisitive.” After a spell working at Fenwick’s, where she modelled hats due to her passing resemblance to Julie Christie, she went into publishing as an assistant for George Weidenfeld at Weidenfeld & Nicolson, which later became her own publisher.  

Did she always know she wanted to write, I ask her? “I was a writer – I didn’t want to be a writer,” Fraser says. When she was 22, her first book, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, was published; it was part of a historical series of books for children. But it was Mary, Queen of Scots that made her famous. It rose to the number two spot of the UK and US bestseller lists – beaten only by Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) in 1969. In the Seventies, Fraser dabbled in crime fiction with her Jemima Shore novels – when Pinter was directing plays in America.

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“I’d be in a hotel room with nothing to do,” she recalls. “Well, that’s not bearable. So, I wrote what I could write without books. You know, I couldn’t travel with the library.”

Life has never been dull for Fraser. Last week, she unveiled the English Heritage Blue Plaque for Caroline Norton in Chesterfield Street in Mayfair.

“It was a wonderful coincidence. Somebody obviously said, ‘Antonia Fraser is writing a book about her.’ I got an invitation at a rather low moment of lockdown, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘Someone up there is smiling.’ It was a wonderful omen.”

‘The Case of the Married Woman’ by Antonia Fraser is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25