A Free Spirit: Antonia Fraser on Lady Caroline Lamb

Writer and journalist Gretchen Friemann met acclaimed historian and author Antonia Fraser to talk history, writing and whether this is her last book.

Lady Antonia Fraser

Even as she approaches her 91st birthday, with her mobility impaired and her hearing no longer perfect, Antonia Fraser, acclaimed historian and author, is contemplating what to write next. This may come as a surprise to readers of her latest book, a biography of one of Lord Byron’s most famous lovers, the sexually adventurous, self- glamourising and reputedly deranged Caroline Lamb, who is said to have shackled the legendary poet with the label ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

In its opening pages, Fraser writes that her book can ‘be regarded as the culmination of an exciting and fulfilling life spent studying History.’

*But in the flesh she insists this is no valediction. Seated on an immaculate cream sofa in the living room of her Holland Park home—a house she shared for over three decades with her second husband Harold Pinter, the Nobel- prize winning playwright, who died in 2008—Fraser says she “chose the word with great care because you can “culminate”’, there is a hesitation, she peers at me through blue-rimmed glasses, smiles beguilingly, then continues; “it doesn’t mean you stop.”