Antonia Fraser

Fraser's Mary Queen of Scots, published in 1969, rescued its subject from both romantic tragedy and Protestant propaganda, reading the casket letters and Scottish politics carefully to present a capable, unlucky ruler caught between factions. It became a bestseller and showed that serious, footnoted history could be gripping. Her later Marie Antoinette, which questions the cake myth and the necklace scandal, and The Weaker Vessel, about seventeenth-century Englishwomen's lives, carry the same instinct: test the legend against the documents and give women their own story.