Antonia Fraser

Marie Antoinette: The Journey, published in 2001, presents its subject as a fourteen-year-old Austrian archduchess dispatched to a French court that never stopped treating her as a foreigner, and traces how the caricature of her was manufactured long before she was put to death in 1793. Sofia Coppola filmed it in 2006. Antonia Fraser, born in London in 1932, is the daughter of Frank Pakenham, seventh Earl of Longford, and of the biographer Elizabeth Longford. She read history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and made her name with Mary Queen of Scots in 1969. Cromwell, Our Chief of Men followed in 1973, then The Weaker Vessel in 1984, which took the Wolfson History Prize, then The Six Wives of Henry VIII and The Gunpowder Plot. She writes detective fiction as well, with Jemima Shore as her investigator, and served as president of English PEN. Her second husband was Harold Pinter, to whom she was married from 1980 until his death in 2008. She was made a dame in 2011.