Mary Queen of Scots [antikvár]

IntroductionI CAN STILL VIVIDLY RECALL THE APPEARANCE of Antonia Eraser's Mary Queen of Scots in 1969. So confident were the publishers of its quality that they had car stickers already printed which read: 'Biography of the Year'. The fact that this book is still, over three decades on, the classic biography of the Scottish queen is ample evidence that the publishers' judgement was well founded. Although there has been a steady stream of other biographies of Mary since, no one has replaced Antonia Eraser's account of the woman Elizabeth I once labelled 'the daughter of debate'. It remains a compulsive read, elegantly written and well researched.Mary Queen of Scots established Antonia Eraser overnight as a major biographer. The daughter of the seventh earl of Longford, she is a member of the formidable Pakenham dynasty. Her mother was Elizabeth Longford, her brother Thomas Pakenham, her sister Rachel Billington and her daughter Flora Eraser, to name but a few of the family's literary talents. This book was to be the first of a series of major biographies including Oliver Cromwell (1973), Charles II (1979) and Marie Antoinette (2001), as well as studies of particular events like the Gunpowder Plot (1996). She is, in addition, a crime writer.Much of Antonia Eraser's writing has been concerned with women's role in history. That preoccupation prompted both The Weaker Vessel (1984), a study of the place of women in Stuart England, and Boadicea 's Chariot {i()S8), a panoramic survey of warrior queens. Her biography of Mary must also be set within the rise of women's studies which was such a notable feature of the 1960s. In Mary Queen of Scots we see her reappraising the queen in the light of the late twentieth-century's interest in forerunners of the emancipated women of our own age, ones who, like the Scottish queen (who came to it by birth), can aspire to exert power. Add to that, having the freedom to explore her subject's sexuality in ways which would have been taboo before the sexual and censorship revolution of the sixties. The result is inevitably a very diiferent portrait of the queen from the one inherited from the Victorian age, when her cult was at its zenith.Antonia Eraser doesn't conceal her own obsession with her heroine. Indeed the opening line of her preface includes an admission of 'being possessed since childhood by a passion for the subject of Mary Queen of