Christine Marion Fraser, (1938-2002)
Michael Rhodes
Scotland, 22 November, 2002. She was 64.
Fraser wrote popular domestic and historical sagas – & had nearly 30
best-sellers under her belt
Christine Marion Fraser was born in Govan, Glasgow, 24 March, 1938,
and was largely self-taught
Career: she worked as a machinist in a knitwear factory, supporting
the rest of her family; her first novel, *Rhanna*, was published in
1978. The tale of the inhabitants of a fictional Hebridean isle, &
this tome ran to several sequels; *King's Croft* followed in 1986, &
it initiated a densely-plotted five-book series set in Aberdeenshire
during the turbulent 19th century; *Noble Beginnings* [1994] launched
a three-book "clogs-'n'-shawls" tale about the family of an Argyll
mill-owner in Victoria's reign. With her latest – and last – series
she returned to the Scottish islands she delighted in writing about:
in *Kinvara* [1998], life in the eponymously named Outer Hebridean
island community revolves around the lighthouse, its keepers and their
families, during the 1920s. The last of the four-book sequence,
*Kinvara Affairs*, came out in 2001.
This February, Public Lending Right figures revealed that she was the
75th most-borrowed author, fiction and non-fiction, in the country.
She married in 1959, Kenneth Ashfield, by whom she had one daughter.
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Michael