“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. 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. “I replied in a lecture that I was not middle-class or nice. “It said, ‘What does this nice middle-class woman know about the torments of Oliver Cromwell?’” recalls Fraser. When Fraser wrote her next book, a biography of Oliver Cromwell, in 1973, she received one particularly presumptuous review. But it wasn’t always so rosy for her as a female writer. 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.
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