Arthur Ronald Fraser

Biography

Arthur Ronald Fraser was born November 3, 1888 to John and Louise Fraser. After receiving his education at St. Paul's School, Fraser enlisted in the British military in 1914, serving in Flanders and France during World War I. After being wounded and rendered unfit for continued military service, Fraser married Sylvia Blanche Powell in 1915, after which he began his career as a civil servant in 1917. He first worked first in the British Civil Service's Department of Overseas Trade. He quickly rose to prominence, eventually occupying a plethora different positions and offices throughout his career. These include general secretary of Anglo-American negotiations (1933); member of the Board of Trade representative to the British Ambassador, Buenos Aires (1933); commercial minister, British Embassy, Paris (1944-49); resident government director of the Suez Canal company; and President of the Caledonian Society of France (1946-53).

Throughout his diplomatic career, Fraser wrote fiction, publishing approximately 31 works from 1924 until 1974, the year of his death. During his life he cultivated a reputation as a practitioner of Wellsian fantasy motifs and themes. During the height of his literary career in the 1930s, The London Times commented on Fraser's “entertaining gift of fantasy” which at its best attained “a nice level of fantastic comedy.” However, Fraser never quite fell into the realms of other well-known and much-beloved writers of the modernist period, fantasy writers or otherwise. Fraser's earlier works are considered to be his best, particularly his novel Rose Anstey (1930), which is the most highly regarded and well-known of his works.

Those few observers and critics of Fraser’s works note that Fraser’s varied fantasy motifs and ideas often contribute to a repeated metaphorical message present in almost all of his published works—an insistence that the limitations of a mundane existence could be overcome and transcended through imagination. “Lambeth Bridge”—a previously undiscovered and unattributed work of Fraser which predates his service and experience in WWI—places Fraser’s belief in imagination’s transcendent power in even greater contrast with the growing ouverte of modernist fiction.