[In the following interview, Samson and Fraser discuss The Wives of Henry VIII.]

When her friend and erstwhile New Yorker editor Bob Gottlieb suggested she write her next book on the wives of Henry VIII, Lady Antonia Fraser remembers thinking that it was the book she was born to write. "I felt like rushing around the streets of New York, accosting people and telling them what I was going to do," she says.

The idea was a natural for a writer who had long since earned her place as a major historian. At 27, Lady Antonia wrote the definitive biography Mary, Queen of Scots, which was a best seller in eight languages. It was followed by equally acclaimed volumes on Oliver Cromwell and Charles II. Then she moved on to The Weaker Vessel, about women's sufferings in the 17th century, and The Warrior Queens, which she wrote afterward "because I felt so depressed that I had to cheer myself up."

Yet for all her renown as an established biographer, Lady Antonia resists pigeonholing. Between her more serious works, she writes crime novels featuring the female detective Jemima Shore and is a fixture—along with her husband, the playwright Harold Pinter—on London's fashionable literary circuit. (She inherited her title from her father, the Earl of Longford, and uses it on feminist grounds—insisting that Lady, like Ms., is a form of address all women should adopt.) During her tenure as president of English PEN, the international writers' association, Lady Antonia has also proved to be a formidable ambassador for freedom of expression, most notably in her tireless dealings with the British Foreign Office over controversial novelist Salman Rushdie and then-visiting dissident Vaclav Havel.

On the day of our interview, Lady Antonia was in the midst of doing publicity for The Wives of Henry VIII, which had just been published in England…. One morning newspaper praised her "Gioconda smile," while another commented that her skin "would make peaches weep in their cream." She dismisses the gushing references to her beauty: "I suppose one's vanity is pleased by it, but if I could be born again with more beauty or more brains, I'd take the brains," she says.

In any case, having recently turned 60, Lady Antonia has found that the label has become a burden. "Once you are called a beauty, then you are either an ex-beauty, a fading beauty, or 'still surprisingly beautiful.' But at least one gets more shortsighted, so when you remove your spectacles to put on makeup, the image in the mirror is pleasingly blurred," she says, laughing.

The author credits her success as a historian to her "ordinary eye." "When I'm reading a diary or looking at a document," she says, "I pick out the things that will interest other readers. I don't do it on purpose, I just see things the way most people do, which is very useful." In The Wives of Henry VIII, she divulges the sort of details one longs to know about royal marriages. Details of court life emerge in a way hitherto ignored by historians: the sleeping arrangements, the hazardous business of sexual intercourse in the public rooms of Hampton Court Palace, and the methods of contraception. She writes of the filthy passageway between Henry's and Catherine of Aragon's rooms and of Anne Boleyn's assessment of Henry's performance as a lover, which lacked both "vertu" (skill) and "puissance" (staying power).

Lady Antonia's obvious enjoyment of research is what brings the book to life. She worked each morning for six years in the British Library, keeping Mediterranean hours, often breaking for lunch with a friend at a nearby Greek restaurant. She also visited the scenes of the crimes: At the Tower of London, she felt the ghosts of Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard as she studied the block where they both lay down their necks. "Unless you can imagine the feel of the ax on your own neck, you shouldn't be writing this book," she says.

Lady Antonia has dealt with the wives as individuals, rather than as the "Divorced, Beheaded, Died, Divorced, Beheaded, Survived" cardboard classifications by which they've previously been categorized. Each of the women is a colorful, headstrong character rather than merely a victim. Lady Antonia admits that, had she been around at the time, she, too, might have fallen for Henry's charms. "When he was young, he was terribly attractive. He wasn't born with a 54-inch waistline and a face like a potato marked with little eyes. When he came to the throne, he was 18, tall, with a slim waist and hips, broad shoulders, golden hair, very athletic, loved music. I think anybody might have fancied him. He sounds marvelous."

And would she have survived? "I think I would have been like Anne Boleyn and needed too much independence," she says. "But I would have produced sons, as I've had three." Lady Antonia doesn't identify with any of the six wives in particular, but says she likes Anne Boleyn for her spirit and Catherine of Aragon for her intelligence: "People tend to think of Catherine as a bigoted old Spanish boot, but she was probably the cleverest queen consort England ever had."

Given the current state of the British royal family, one cannot help but speculate on how Fergie and Diana might have fared at the hands of Henry. The Duchess of York, it's agreed, would have lost her head. "She has no common sense. I think that is the kindest comment to make," Lady Antonia says. The Princess of Wales, however, would have survived. "Royalty had privacy then. It's tragic what's happening. As long as heirs were produced, we, the people, wouldn't have known about the rest of it."

And what would a biographer make of Lady Antonia's own life? "Oh, I don't think writers make very interesting subjects," she says, a touch disingenuously. "Well," she adds, after a moment's reflection, "it was Hilary Belloc who said, '[Her] sins were scarlet, but [her] books were read.' I think that says it all."