Keynes and Isaiah Berlin were regular guests in her childhood home-but she says she has earned her own living since she was 21, first by working for a publisher, then from journalism and books. Fraser has always been well-connected-Hugh Gaitskell, J.M. She adds that her well-born first husband was “entirely dependent” on his salary as a politician. As a second-born son, her father inherited little from his parents. Fraser says that the family was not wealthy. “More or less instantly, I was seized with the desire to write the beautiful big histories myself,” she records in her 2015 memoir, “My History.”ĭespite her aristocratic roots-her father, Frank Pakenham, served as a Labour minister in the House of Lords and later inherited the title of Lord Longford-Ms. The thrill of learning about things that actually happened, often near her home, was far more intoxicating than anything she found in novels. “It was like suddenly discovering this huge pageant behind me, and I could go wander about in it,” she says. She vividly recalls a children’s history of England called “Our Island Story” that opened her eyes to the wonders of the past. Fraser was a precocious child and voracious reader.
Growing up in Oxford in the 1930s and ’40s, Ms. “‘It was like suddenly discovering this huge pageant behind me, and I could go wander about in it,’ she says. She was also instrumental in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which expanded access to divorce and gave women legal protection from exploitation by their husbands. Her advocacy helped lead to the passage of the Custody of Infants Act of 1839, arguably the first feminist legislation in English history, which made it possible for mothers to petition the courts for custody of their children. “A woman is made a helpless wretch by these laws of men,” Norton once lamented. Yet the writings she is best known for today are her pamphlets arguing for the rights of married women. Fraser writes that Caroline Norton was witty, beautiful and charismatic, the author of over a dozen well-received novels, plays and volumes of poetry. In “The Case of the Married Woman,” published in the U.S.
It seemed there’d been no progress since the 17th century.” “I was surprised by the appalling state of women’s legal rights. Fraser, 89, says over video from her home in London, while her two cats sashay around the room. “The fact that she was found innocent of adultery, yet George Norton could throw her out of the house, legally take away their three children and live off the copyright of her books, that absolutely stunned me,” Ms. George punished Caroline by stealing away their three young children and keeping the proceeds from her writing for himself. Fraser was shocked when she learned aboutĪ well-born Englishwoman and prolific writer, who in 1836 was publicly accused by her husband George of having an affair with the prime minister, Lord Melbourne. Yet despite her familiarity with historical sexism, Ms.
0 kommentar(er)
