A conversation with Antonia Fraser about what is, what was, and what might have been on the eve of the U.S. publication of her new biography Marie Antoinette.

Why did you choose to write a biography about Marie Antoinette? What was it about her that piqued your interest over other female historical figures?

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette, but my first biography, Mary Queen of Scots, published thirty-two years ago, was about a roughly similar figure, a tragic and fascinating queen who was executed. After Mary Queen of Scots, I turned to the farthest subject possible: Cromwell. Half my readers after Mary Queen of Scots, suggested Marie Antoinette incidentally, and some of them recently have reminded me of the words I used in my letter back: "Not now but one day in the very remote future."

Do you consider this book revisionist history in any sense? Do you feel that Marie Antoinette has been treated unfairly by history?

The book is, I am sure, revisionist, although I am a little too close to it at the moment to say in detail. Certainly I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history, in which my own The Weaker Vessel, published in the early 1980s, played its part, I believe. I have been able to take advantage of recent work by Robert Darnton and Chantal Thomas on French pornography directed at Marie Antoinette. There is amazing hostility to Marie Antoinette in some earlier biographies due to misogyny. I have tried to look at her, her successes and failures, in terms of what she faced, with detachment.

There seems to be more in this book about Marie Antoinette's childhood and adolescence than we have ever seen in any other work about her. Is that the case? If so, was that intentional? Did you perceive a specific gap in what has been written about Marie Antoinette?

Yes, I do believe that the concentration in my book on Marie Antoinette's childhood, and on her family influences, is very important. It is surprising how some books actually start with her arrival in France! For me the influence of her family -- large, close in many ways, rivals in others -- is an essential element, and the influence of her mother, Maria Teresa, can never be overestimated.

Was there a single new piece of information about her that you uncovered in your research that truly surprised and amazed you?

I was amazed by the details of her married sex life--or rather the lack of it for nearly eight years--and found consultations with medical experts certainly took me along some unexpected paths. The unexpurgated details of Maria Teresa's letters (written in French) have been known in full since 1958 in a German translation, which I consulted. However, I think mine is the fullest and most plausible account of what went on.

Among the royal houses of eighteenth-century Europe, the life of a young archduchess is one of little freedom and few choices. However, are you able to envision Marie Antoinette in a modern context? Had she been born two hundred years later, who might this remarkable young woman have become?

Good question. One couldn't help thinking of Princess Diana when writing some passages, although of course I don't make a mention in the text, which would be anachronistic. Forgetting Princess Diana, I think Marie Antoinette would have made an excellent queen for a constitutional monarchy -- love of children, love of charity, love of the arts . . . all just what was needed. But if one forgets the royal sphere, she might perhaps have been an actress! Or a singer! She loved opera so much.

If the French Revolution hadn't happened in her lifetime, how do you think Marie Antoinette's life might have played out? What would the world's collective memory have been for her? Would she have been remembered much at all?

Her glamour and her love of the arts would have meant that she would have been remembered like the two royal mistresses in the preceding reign, Pompadour and Du Barry (she was however much more like Pompadour in her elegance than Du Barry, who was slightly vulgar). There would have been a Style Marie Antoinette, I expect, and we would admire rooms in museums decorated in her taste.

This interview appears in an abridged form in the Nan A. Talese Fall 2001 Catalog of Authors.

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