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).

Contemplatively vague

"... he hoped he discerned the large, contemplatively vague figure of Dr Frances Yates..."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Yates

Literary Matriarch

"There was Lady Longford, biographer of Queen Victoria..."

From The Times
October 24, 2002

Elizabeth Longford was matriarch of the most powerful and well-connected literary dynasty in the land — that of the Pakenhams, Frasers, Pinters and Billingtons — and her life was spent among intellectuals for whom the production of books of all kinds was at least as natural as the production of children. Her own historical writings combined erudition and thorough research with wide appeal. As Countess of Longford, wife of the 7th Earl (Frank Pakenham), she was a notable crusader in society and in Labour politics.

In 1964 Longford published the book that made her name, Victoria RI, a superbly sympathetic yet realistic portrait. There had not been a substantial life of the Queen for many years, and it is not too much to say that she was the first biographer to make Victoria into a living and understandable human being.

Among her children are the historians Antonia Fraser and Thomas Pakenham, the novelist Rachel Billington and the poet Judith Kazantzis.

benignly severe

"There was Dame Helen Gardner, head up, face benignly severe ..."

Professor Dame Helen Louise Gardner DBE (1908-1986) was an English literary academic and critic. A fellow of St Hilda's College, Oxford from 1942, she became Merton Professor of Renaissance literature in the University of Oxford in 1966.

Her specialist areas were T. S. Eliot, the Metaphysical poets, Milton and religious poetry, with many essays published on the subjects, as well as on literary criticism itself.
Her 1949 collection of essays, The Art of T.S. Eliot, is regarded as a seminal work on the poet. In particular, she challenged the notion that Eliot was only accessible to those well-versed in his many allusions:

It is better, in reading poetry of this kind, to trouble too little about the ‘meaning’ than to trouble too much. If there are passages whose meaning seems elusive, where we feel we are ‘missing the point,’ we should read on, preferably aloud... We must find the meaning in the reading...

Idolater?

"...from Dr Roy Strong, at that time Director of the Gallery, and an iconographer, possibly even an idolater, of the Virgin Queen."

Sir Roy Colin Strong FRSL (born 23 August 1935) is an English art historian, museum curator, writer, broadcaster and landscape designer.

He became assistant keeper of the National Portrait Gallery in 1959, and was its director 1967-73: Sir Roy came to prominence at age 32 when he became the youngest director of the National Portrait Gallery. He set about transforming its conservative image with a series of extrovert shows, including "600 Cecil Beaton portraits 1928-1968."

A different kind of people

"Alexander amused himself by counting powerful women: there was Dame Sybil Thorndike, graciously accepting a throne-like chair ..."

Dame Agnes Sybil Thorndike CH DBE (24 October 1882 – 9 June 1976) was a British actress.
In 1908 Sybil was spotted by the playwright George Bernard Shaw when she understudied the leading role of Candida in a tour directed by Shaw himself. There she also met her future husband, Lewis Casson. She played the title role of George Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan in 1924, which had been written with her specifically in mind. The production was a huge success, and was revived repeatedly until her final performance in the role in 1941.

Both Sybil and Lewis were active members of the Labour Party, and held strong left-wing views. Even when the 1926 General Strike stopped the first run of Saint Joan, they both still supported the strikers. Nonetheless, she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1931. As a pacifist, Sybil was a member of the Peace Pledge Union and gave readings for its benefit.