The Mission -- "for the rest of your life"

This blog intends to provide a "complete, unbiassed" resource for the enquiring and enthusiastic reader of A. S. Byatt's "Frederica Potter Quartet" of novels.

Is this woman Shakespeare?

"He had once, with delight, read a book with a laudatory preface by Erle Stanley Gardner that "proved" that Shakespeare's plays were the secret fruit of the Queen's marriage to England ..."

Shake-speare, The Mystery.
Sweet, George Elliot. Stanford Univ. Press, (Palo Alto), 1956.

Foreword by Erle Stanley Gardner.

Britomart

"If she was Belphoebe, then Frederica ... was Britomart ..."

Britomart figures in Edmund Spenser's knightly epic The Faerie Queene, where she is an allegorical figure of the virgin Knight of Chastity, representing English virtue - in particular, English military power - through a newly-coined etymology that associated Brit- as in Briton with Martis, here thought as of Mars, the Roman war god. (Spenser: Faërie Queene, book iii. Her marriage, book v. 6.)

Belphoebe

"... she had a look, he thought fancifully, of a modern Belphoebe in those garments, sunny hair and the accoutrements of a huntress."


Belphoebe (bel fee'bee, Greek, "sharp light")
The name may have been coined by Edmund Spenser for his character in The Faerie Queene. The Greek word belos means "dart" while phoibos
(root of the familiar Phoebe) means "light."


Spenser's Belphoebe is a well-armed virgin huntress, a version of both the goddess Diana and Queen Elizabeth I, and a militant personification of chastity. Her fighting skills are repeatedly tested and proven.

Antonia dreaming?

"... and wearing a St. Laurent skirt..."

Antonia Fraser

"There was also Lady Antonia Fraser ..."

Lady Antonia Fraser was born on August 27, 1932, in London, England. She is the daughter of the seventh Earl of Longford, Francis Pakenham (born 1905), a statesman who had several cabinet posts under Labor Prime Minister Harold Wilson. He was also a famed public crusader and writer. Her mother was the Countess of Longford, Elizabeth Pakenham (born 1906), the author of a series of popular biographical studies of Queen Victoria, Wellington, Churchill, the Queen Mother, and Queen Elizabeth II.
It was natural that Antonia should become a writer, coming from a family of writers, the "literary Longfords." As well as her father and mother, Lady Antonia's sister Rachel Billington was a novelist; another sister, Judith Kazantzis, was a feminist poet; a brother, Thomas Pakenham, was an historian; and her two eldest daughters, Rebecca and Flora, were both writers.

Lady Antonia was educated at the Catholic convent and Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall, BA 1953). She converted to Catholicism in her teens, following her parents' lead, and at the age of 23 she married Sir Hugh Fraser, a handsome Catholic, Scots nobleman and war hero with the SAS (Special Air Services). He was 15 years her senior.

Sir Hugh Fraser had been a Conservative member of Parliament for Stafford since 1945 and had served in Conservative cabinets. They lived in London (when he was at the House of Commons) and in summer on an island in Inverness-shire, Scotland, owned by him. They had three sons and three daughters, but their marriage was dissolved in 1977. Already she was living with Harold Pinter, the playwright, whom she married in 1980. Her first husband died of cancer in 1984.
Her first job was in George Weidenfeld's publishing house as a general assistant. Lord Weidenfeld was a family friend and had Lady Antonia editing the expletives from Saul Bellow's The Adventure of Augie March for the British market. She published several juvenile items and A History of Toys (1966) before her major work, Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1969, which won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography. Her mother, Lady Longford, had won the same prize five years before with a biography of Queen Victoria (1964).

Elizabeth Tudor as Virgo-Astraea

In Greek mythology, Astræa or Astrea (English translation: "star-maiden") was a daughter of Zeus and Themis or of Eos and Astræus. She and her mother were both personifications of justice, though Astræa was also associated with innocence and purity.
Astræa, the celestial virgin, was the last of the immortals to live with humans during the Iron Age, the final stage in the world's disintegration from the utopian Golden Age. Fleeing from the new wickedness of humanity, she ascended to heaven to become the constellation Virgo; the scales of justice she carried became the nearby constellation Libra, reflected in her symbolic association with Justitia in Latin culture.
Astræa's hoped-for return (that is, the return of the utopian Golden Age of which she was the ambassador) was referred to in a phrase from Virgil's Eclogue IV: "Iam redit et virgo, redeunt Saturnia Regna" (The Virgin and the Days of Old return).