Frances Lincoln

Frances Elisabeth Rosemary Lincoln (20 March 1945 – 26 February 2001) was an English independent publisher of illustrated books. She won a Woman of the Year award in 1995.

She went to school at St George's School, Harpenden where she became Head Girl.

Her university education was at Somerville College, Oxford. (Somerville at that time was a women's college, known in Oxford as "the college".) There she read Greats (the Oxford term for traditional courses in the humanities, with emphasis on the ancient classics of Greece and Rome, including philosophy).

The drug smuggler Howard Marks was a student at Balliol College, Oxford while Frances was at Somerville. In his autobiography Mr. Nice he describes her as "vivacious". The book contains an anecdote of Marks dropping acid for the first time before visiting Frances in her rooms. While they sat listening to The Rolling Stones, Marks described to her the trip he was experiencing.

In 1970 she started work as an Assistant Editor at the London publishing firm of Studio Vista. She went on to become its Managing Director. From Studio Vista she moved to a job with the publisher Marshall Cavendish, and from there to Weidenfeld and Nicolson, where she was given her own imprint.

A story that followed her throughout her career, often passed on from employees to new recruits, was of the staff-walkout and demonstration she headed while at Studio Vista in 1975. This was a protest against redundancies proposed by Collier Macmillan, the firm that had come to own Studio Vista. The protest went on for a number of days, and is described as a strike. It achieved concessions from Collier Macmillan. (The story itself is striking for the incongruity between the shy and reserved bluestocking figure of Frances Lincoln, and the tale's casting of her in the role of "strike leader".)

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