My obsession with the CW tv show 'Reign' knows no bounds, apparently, because during the Christmas hiatus I decided to make up for the lack of teenaged Mary Stuart in my life by reading an 800 page biography of her. For those who feel they are too good for the CW --first of all, you are wrong; their programming has never been better -- 'Reign' is a sexy period drama about the young adulthood of Mary Stuart, a bit like 'The O.C.' mixed with 'The Tudors.' All of the costumes are adapted Free People items, so that should give you a pretty good flavor of it.

Needless to say, it shares very, very little in common with this tremendously great biography by Antonia Fraser, whose talents I have already espoused. I have been disappointed but not exactly surprised by how historically inaccurate the tv show has turned out to be, but that doesn't mean I'm not enjoying the book immensely. Sometimes nothing quite satisfies like a long, meaty biography, and I've read enough Antonia Fraser at this point to feel almost like I'm slipping into a very elaborate fictional universe of her creation. She has written about this period in British history pretty extensively, so each new volume I consume is just adding another layer of richness. And every time I come across a fact that appears in the show, I become very proud of and happy for the producers and their very minor success in transitioning fact into fiction.

In my recap of Wolf Hall, I alluded to a phase of Tudor dynasty obsession in which I devoured many biographies, the vast majority of which were written by Antonia Fraser, including her The Six Wives of Henry VIII. I found them at the Ann Arbor Public Library and knew very little about the author when I pulled them off the shelves, but that chance encounter sparked an Antonia Fraser devotion in which I regularly engage.

As if it's not enough that she's a terrific biographer and writer, she is also the widow of Nobel Laureate Harold Pinter; as the daughter of an Earl, is officially referred to with the honorific "Lady Antonia," and she once survived an IRA bombing with Caroline Kennedy. She has won a significant number of awards for her non-fiction writing, and has penned a series of detective novels. Likely of greatest interest to Bookhive readers is her biography Marie Antoinette: The Journey, which was the primary basis for the Sofia Coppola film 'Marie Antoinette.'