mary queen of scots antonia fraser review

From conjecturing that Queen Mary may have thought such-and-such it is a short step to saying that she thought it. It is easy for any biographer, trained or otherwise, to put the emotional stress in the wrong place, and to forget in the agonies of her heroine the agonies she created, and there is always the temptation to “stretch” sources which are always inadequate and often ambiguous.

They pad out their bibliographies and cut back their footnotes (blandly announcing that this is to humor their illiterate readers, the poor dears), they hopefully cram their prefaces with acknowledgments to Professor X and Doctor Y, and in the last resort they pretend that a book to which they have devoted years of effort, of one kind or another, is only an interim report. It is the defect of most “amateur” historians that they evade this drudgery, or abandon it halfway through. Only a practicing historian knows the hours of boring and backbreaking labor that go into a book like this and in a well-trampled field like the life of Mary Stuart the burden of such labor is not lightened by the hope of some exciting find.

I do not mean to sound sarcastic or patronizing. Lady Antonia Fraser is young, beautiful, and rich, an earl’s daughter married to a busy and successful politician, the mother of a large family yet she has surmounted all these handicaps to authorship to produce a first-rate historical biography.

Mary queen of scots antonia fraser review