Reply #5: Antonia Fraser connected to Princess Diaries

[madfloridian]

http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=1148882004

No: Princesses Charlotte, Augusta, Elizabeth, Sophia, Amelia and Mary (in the all-important order of seniority, which meant closeness to power, which meant bossiness) were altogether more dutiful. Without Fraser, who had become intrigued by their conspiratorial, secretive letters when researching her life of Queen Caroline, they might well have slid off unregarded into the footnotes of academic history.

Their biographer is, at least genetically, a natural-born biographer. At 17, she was already working in the British Museum, helping to research books such as her mother’s biography of Charles II and her grandmother’s books about Victorian women. Mother is, of course, Lady Antonia Fraser; grandmother was Elizabeth Longford: search the massed ranks of British biographers and you won’t find a purer professional pedigree.

Nor is she the last of the fabulously talented Fraser girls. One of her sisters, Rebecca, is the biographer of Charlotte Brontë; another one, Natasha, European editor of Harper’s Bazaar, last year produced a biography of Hollywood producer Sam Spiegel. This, then, is a family with formidable literary connections that link up across generations...."