Bluestocking Oxford

By Olivia Hurton

On the subject of history books, Catherine Morland—the fledgling heroine of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey—has this to say: ‘It tells me nothing that does not vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.’ Lady Antonia Fraser, equipped with an enviable intellect, unshakable sense of justice, and a joyously daring approach to historical inquiry, has spent a lifetime putting this to rights. Her books bristle with questions about female power, passion, and influence, exposing the complexities of her subjects, and resisting the need to revert to one-dimensional (and flagrantly wrong) critical views. In writing about heroines for her historical biographies, Fraser has become one.

Published in 1969, Fraser’s debut biography Mary Queen of Scots broke new ground. Saturated with rigorous research and a distinctive sympathetic objectivity, readers were immediately obsessed. It was a bestseller both in the UK and America, popularising women’s history and establishing her as a formidable authoress. What she offered in her writing was something human in terms of feelings and details. ‘I behaved as badly as I could with Mary Queen of Scots,’ Fraser explains to me, ‘and took every advantage of anecdotes of giving birth to princes.’ ‘Not that I had,’ she adds mischievously. ‘No woman who had written about Mary Queen of Scots had had children’. In fact, ‘the only woman who had written about her was a [Agnes] Strickland who hadn’t been married.’

Fraser’s love of history is not, as is often wrongly assumed, part of a family tradition, however a daring spirit and going against the current most certainly is. When asked about bringing herself out as a debutante in the 1950s, she enthuses: ‘it was an adventure – it was not what my contemporaries were doing and therefore I wanted to do it’. Fierce independence was a trait shared by her mother, Elizabeth Longford, who ‘was a classicist at Oxford and a [Labour] politician’ with an eye on the House of Commons not long after the time women had legitimately entered politics (Lady Astor was the first female MP to take up her seat in parliament in 1919). ‘She stood three times for parliament, alas without success. That’s what she aimed at.’ In fact, it was only in her sixties that Longford embarked on an unexpectedly happy new career, penning histories about subjects like Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington.

Of inestimable value to lifelong intellectual curiosity, Fraser maintains, is a wonderful early education. ‘I think I owe a tremendous lot to being at the Dragon School [in Oxford]. I was very happy there.’ But this was no conventional education; young Fraser was one of only a handful of girls in a predominantly male school, where she learnt about history by way of Shakespeare and was a formidable rugby player (later her son Orlando would say ‘we always thought you made all that up’). It taught her other important lessons, too. ‘I certainly learnt how to deal with [men]’; she explains, ‘I learnt the valuable thing that women are quite as clever as men, if they are as clever’. Bright as they were, it was not until 1980 that women could attend Christ Church, where Fraser’s father, Lord Longford, held a position as a don. ‘I first knew Christ Church as a very cold place and my father lived in very cold rooms. I was a little girl, literally four or five.’ Smiling, she confesses: ‘When I was fifteen or sixteen, I changed my view and thought it was full of lovely Hercules’.’

She soon won an Exhibition to read PPE at Lady Margaret Hall. In the last year of her studies, Fraser made a crucial discovery: ‘I found myself with two male students at Magdalen and doing special projects in history, at which point I discovered archives and I’ve never felt so happy. And I worked and worked (which I never did).’ She reflects, ‘I can still remember the discovery of references, and the happiness.’ For Bluestocking contributors looking to ignite their inspiration and identify a subject for an article, Lady Antonia offers sage words. ‘I think you want to choose someone that you would like to have met. People mocked me for choosing Oliver Cromwell as my second history book and then I floored them by saying, but I would have liked to have met Oliver Cromwell. Which [made] everybody shut up.’ Important also is a sense of the era. ‘Ideally you should write about someone who lives in a period where you know something about it. That is to say, I think it is quite difficult to build a period and a person at the same time with the same vitality.’ Fraser says if it’s not right, it will soon become obvious. After conducting research for biographies on Queen Alexandra and Elizabeth I, they were abandoned because—as Fraser puts it—‘there was a sort of going out with someone and realising it’s not [going to work]’.

Incandescent subjects for Fraser more recently were Caroline Norton (1808-1877) and Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828), or the ‘Sweet Carolines’ as she tenderly refers to them. These nineteenth-century women were rebellious, courageous, romantic and frightfully intelligent – Lady Antonia, c’est toi? First came The Case of the Married Woman (2021) which drew much-needed attention to Caroline Norton’s campaigns for women’s basic legal rights. Married to an abhorrent emotional and physical abuser, George Norton, the relationship exploded in a highly publicised legal case, where Norton accused his wife of ‘criminal conversations’ [adultery] with Lord Melbourne, the prime minister no less. Barred access to her children and her literary earnings, she swiftly set to work to reform the law, with a pen for a sword. Instead of support from other women, her ‘legal devilry’ (to use her sister Helen’s words) was regarded as self-serving. Expressing our shared frustration, Fraser protests: ‘That was the last thing it was! […] You were annoyed, I was angry.’

Lady Caroline Lamb appealed to Fraser for different reasons. Hitherto regarded by scholars as a footnote in Lord Byron’s love life, driven mad by obsessive passion and embittered by rejection, Fraser’s account draws attention to her rich intellect and volcanic capacity for feeling, one no doubt feeding into the other. Byron said ‘he wouldn’t have had her any colder a little further on,’ which, Fraser adds wryly, ‘is rather handy of him.’ In fact, the historian has a copy of Thomas Phillips’ gloriously verdant 1813 portrait of Caro in her London home; ‘she was there all the time I was writing,’ Fraser smiles. ‘I think I sort of was rather in love with her. She was so occasionally terribly irritating but enjoyably, sort of indulgently’; ‘I wanted to rescue her. She was extremely clever, I mean really intellectual, if you read her novels, which very few people have.’

Infamous was roman à clef Glenarvon (1816), a compulsive gothic tale that restaged the affairs of Lamb’s Whig social circle and laid bare her relationship with Lord Byron. Was revenge Lamb’s motive? Fraser thinks not. ‘She let rip. I don’t think it’s a particularly well-planned book. I think she let passion overcome her and she had a good time.’ Needless to say, Byron was furious, declaring the novel a ‘f*** and publish’. For contemporary readers, there’s still something exhilarating about Caroline’s devil-may-care attitude. ‘I certainly don’t think she had shame,’ Fraser adds.

Ensuring women from history continue to be reassessed and brought to new audiences is important to Fraser, an ambition that Bluestocking Oxford shares. To support this, the historian established the Antonia Fraser Grant, providing aid for the writing of ‘biography of a woman or women’. She laments how ‘in the author’s foundation which Michael Holroyd and I founded, the people [authors] were having terrible difficulty with publishers in getting grants to write about their women. It was quite obvious […] so I wanted to give them money.’ Judging from a wave of new women’s history publications, it seems the tide may be turning.

So, what’s next for our tireless heroine? A new book, actually: Patchwork Pieces. ‘It’s going to be published on 10^th October,’ she tells me excitedly. ‘You’ll have a scoop.’ This beautifully produced volume is a tapestry of memories, weaving personal history with Fraser’s lively commentary. Accompanying the text are sprightly pictures: we see Fraser happily garbed as a French Revolutionary; then she’s knight-like knocking down the Berlin wall; now she’s arch author in her idyllic Scottish writing hut. It’s like climbing under a patchwork quilt and having Fraser tell you tales from her many adventures. Lectissima heroina Lady Antonia Fraser indeed.

Lady Antonia Fraser is Bluestocking’s Patron and Patchwork Pieces published by Bernhurst Press is out now.

Recommended Reading

Antonia Fraser, Mary Queen of Scots (1969)

—The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England (1984)

—Marie Antoinette: The Journey (2001)

—My History: A Memoir of Growing Up (2015)

—The Case of the Married Woman: Caroline Norton: A 19^th Century Heroine Who Wanted Justice for Women (2021)

—Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (2023)