The renowned historian and biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette, investigates the lot of women in seventeenth-century England. Drawing on period diaries, letters, and other papers, Fraser sketches portraits of a variety of women, both highborn and humble, during the tumultuous century between the death of Elizabeth and Queen Anne’s assumption of the throne. More than a collection of female biographies, The Weaker Vessel offers fresh insight into its subjects’ attitudes and lives, with appearances by heiresses and dairy maids, holy women and prostitutes, criminals and educators, widows and witches, midwives and mothers, heroines, courtesans, prophetesses, businesswomen, ladies of the court, and that new breed, the actress.
"An almost encyclopedic chronicle of women in 17th century England...wives, warriors, heiresses, preachers... alive with anecdote after anecdote." – The New York Times Book Review
Antonia Fraser is the author of many internationally bestselling historical works, including Love and Louis XIV; Marie Antoinette, which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola; The Wives of Henry VIII; and Mary Queen of Scots. She is also the author of the memoirs Must You Go?, about her relationship with and marriage to the playwright Harold Pinter, and My History. She has received the Wolfson Prize for History, the Medlicott Medal awarded by Britain’s Historical Association, and the Franco-British Society’s Enid McLeod Literary Prize. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2011 and a Companion of Honour in 2018 for services to literature.
View titles by Antonia Fraser
The renowned historian and biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, author of Marie Antoinette, investigates the lot of women in seventeenth-century England. Drawing on period diaries, letters, and other papers, Fraser sketches portraits of a variety of women, both highborn and humble, during the tumultuous century between the death of Elizabeth and Queen Anne’s assumption of the throne. More than a collection of female biographies, The Weaker Vessel offers fresh insight into its subjects’ attitudes and lives, with appearances by heiresses and dairy maids, holy women and prostitutes, criminals and educators, widows and witches, midwives and mothers, heroines, courtesans, prophetesses, businesswomen, ladies of the court, and that new breed, the actress.
"An almost encyclopedic chronicle of women in 17th century England...wives, warriors, heiresses, preachers... alive with anecdote after anecdote." – The New York Times Book Review
Antonia Fraser is the author of many internationally bestselling historical works, including Love and Louis XIV; Marie Antoinette, which was made into a film by Sofia Coppola; The Wives of Henry VIII; and Mary Queen of Scots. She is also the author of the memoirs Must You Go?, about her relationship with and marriage to the playwright Harold Pinter, and My History. She has received the Wolfson Prize for History, the Medlicott Medal awarded by Britain’s Historical Association, and the Franco-British Society’s Enid McLeod Literary Prize. She was made a Dame of the British Empire in 2011 and a Companion of Honour in 2018 for services to literature.
View titles by Antonia Fraser
