Claire Fraser
Comments2this wiki
Redirected from Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser
| Claire Fraser | |
|---|---|
| Biographical Information | |
| Full Name | Claire Elizabeth Beauchamp Randall Fraser |
| Born | October 20, 1918 |
| Occupation | Doctor |
| Status | Alive |
| Clan | Fraser (by marriage) |
| Family Information | |
| Family Members | Henry Beauchamp (father) † Julia Moriston (mother) † |
Claire Beauchamp Fraser is a nurse, later a doctor, and a time-traveller who lives both in the 20th century (where she was married to Frank Randall) and the 18th century (where she is married to Jamie Fraser). Claire has one daughter, Brianna Fraser, who is fathered by Jamie but brought up in the 20th century. Claire, the primary first-person narrator of the Outlander universe, is compassionate but medically ruthless, with a hopeless tendency to need rescued and a quick tongue. Her favorite exclamation is "Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ!", said over fifty times in the novels. As of the latest novel in the series, Claire is in 1778, alive and well in Philadelphia, a six-times grandmother and published physician.
History before Outlander 
Edit
Claire Beauchamp was born to Henry Beauchamp and Julia Moriston on 20 October, 1918. Her parents died in a car accident when she was only five, and Claire was adopted by her uncle. Quentin Lambert Beauchamp was an archaeologist and historian whose work took him all over the globe. He attempted to enroll her at an English boarding school, but she stubbornly refused to attend.
- "Faced with the necessity of prying my chubby fingers off the car's door handle and dragging me by the
heels up the steps of the school, Uncle Lamb, who hated personal conflict of any kind, had sighed in
exasperation, then finally shrugged and tossed his better judgment out the window along with my newly purchased round straw boater." - Claire, Outlander (Chapter One)
Claire consequently spent her childhood traveling the world with her uncle while he worked, becoming accustomed to fairly primitive conditions. She later claims that her first kiss was at the age of eight, in Egypt with the nine-year-old dragoman's son.
Claire's Marriage to FrankEdit
Claire met Frank Wolverton Randall, also an historian, when he came to consult her uncle about his work. They were soon married, and spent a brief two-day honeymoon in the Scottish Highlands, followed by only a few months together before the outbreak of World War II. Claire and Frank were separated for most of the war. Frank trained as an officer in MI-6, and Claire as a nurse. Both served their country in their respective roles for the duration of the war. Once the war was over, Claire and Frank, reunited, decided to go on a second honeymoon in Scotland to reestablish their marriage (1946). They chose Mrs. Baird's B&B in Inverness, a city in the Scottish Highlands situated near an ancient stone circle called Craigh na Dun.
Events of OutlanderEdit
One morning, while collecting plant samples at the stone circle, Claire falls through the cleft in the main stone and is transported back in time to 1743. Upon moving away from the stone circle, Claire immediately runs into a battle between a group of local Highlanders, and British officers led by Jonathan Wolverton Randall. Randall, who demonstrates an amazing physical similarity to his six-times great-grandson Frank, assaults Claire, but she is rescued by Murtagh Fitzgibbons Fraser , one of the Highlanders, who are cattle-raiding in the area.
Murtagh takes Claire to a cottage wherein she meets Dougal MacKenzie, Rupert MacKenzie, and the other clansmen, who at first (since she is dressed only in a modern cotton dress) take her for a prostitute. Also in the cottage is an injured young man named Jamie, apparently a kinsman of Dougal's. Claire, starting to suspect that she may no longer be in modern Scotland, announces that she is a nurse and sets Jamie's dislocated shoulder and binds his bayonet wound. This demonstration is enough for Dougal to decide to bring her along, although he and the other men are startled at her tendency to use strong language. Claire rides with Jamie, and the two strike up a tentative friendship.
Adventures With the MacKenziesEdit
The group takes Claire to Castle Leoch, the seat of Clan MacKenzie, where she is presented to Dougal's brother Colum. It is in Colum's library that Claire finally realizes she is in 1743. Her story of a widowed English lady beset by highwaymen is more or less accepted by Colum, and she is shown to the chambers of the last castle healer, where she promptly sets up a modest nursing practice. Claire continues her friendship with Jamie, who tells her many interesting stories of his past, but never his full name or his family's history. He teasingly begins to call her "Sassenach," the Gaelic translation of "outlander" or "Englishman"; the nickname later becomes a term of great affection. Claire also befriends the procurator fiscal's wife, Geillis Duncan, and meets a young girl named Laoghaire MacKenzie, who falls madly in love with Jamie.
Colum, unsure whether Claire is a French or an English spy, sends her with Dougal and a large group of clansmen (including Rupert, Jamie and the elderly lawyer Ned Gowan) to collect the clan's yearly rents, for her to speak with the commander of Fort William about reconnecting to her (fictional) distant French relatives. During the journey, Claire learns that Dougal is a secret Jacobite, collecting money to raise an army for the exiled Stuarts.
The commander of Fort William is, of course, Captain Jonathan Randall, who thinks Claire is a spy for the MacKenzies and threatens to have her hanged. Unable to think of any other way to protect her from Randall, Dougal retrieves Claire from the English and forces her into marrying Jamie. She learns his full name just before the wedding ceremony, which takes place in the same small church where she and Frank were married almost two hundred years in the future. Claire, stunned by the quick turn of events, finds solace in married intimacy with Jamie, who reveals that he has been in love with her for some time, and was more than happy to marry her.
Claire's Marriage to JamieEdit
Jamie reveals much more of his past, including his childhood in Lallybroch and the years before he was sent to France to join the army. He tells Claire the events of his life which involved Jack Randall, including arrest, the rape of his sister, floggings, and homosexual advances. Jamie and Claire grow closer and closer as the group travels around the countryside, and by the time they reach the location where modern-day Inverness would be located, Claire is very much in love with Jamie. Regretting that she will break his heart by running away, she tries to reach Craigh na Dun on her own and return to Frank. She is caught, however, by one of Jonathan Randall's staff, and is brought to the English fort he commands.
Jamie and the other men rescue Claire from the English, committing arson, murder, and assault in the process, and flee back towards Castle Leoch. Claire doesn't at first realize what serious danger she caused, and is furious when Jamie calmly announces he must beat her for disobedience. Afterwards, however, the other men treat her more kindly than before, and she and Jamie make up when he tells her stories of being whipped for disobedience as a boy, although she threatens to disembowel him if he does it again.
Return to Castle LeochEdit
The group returns to the seat of Clan MacKenzie, where Claire encounters the now-jealous Laoghaire. Jamie finally buys Claire a wedding ring, a woven silver band engraved with thistles; she wears it on her right hand, opposite Frank's gold wedding ring. Claire becomes friends once again with Geillis Duncan; one day they encounter a child abandoned on a hillside. Claire's natural compassion moves her to try to save the child, but Geilie stops her, saying the parents consider it a changeling. She is seen with Geillis and Jamie on the hillside; the child later dies. Geilie's husband mysteriously dies a few days later, and before Jamie leaves on a stag hunt, he warns Claire to stay away from the widow, since she is now rumored to be a witch.
Left alone in Leoch, one day Claire trustingly follows Laoghaire's instructions to visit an apparently ill Geilie. But upon arriving in Cranesmuir, Claire is seized along with the perfectly healthy Geilie and thrown in the thieves' hole to await trial for witchcraft. Geillis tells Claire that she killed her husband when he learned she was pregnant: she also reveals that the child is Dougal's, and that she (Geilie) is also a fervent Jacobite.
When the trial begins, Ned Gowan arrives to defend Claire; his efforts lead the judges to have the women thrown in the lake (to see if they float) rather than burning them outright, but Claire's sharp objections cause them to have her flogged. As she is being whipped, Jamie arrives and dramatically throws a set of jet rosary beads onto her neck, proving that she could not be a witch. Geillis helps to distract the crowd by proclaiming that she, but not Claire, is a witch: as Geilie strips off her gown to reveal her secret pregnancy (saving her from being executed), Claire sees a vaccination scar on the other woman's arm, proving that she, too, is a time-traveller from the twentieth century.
Claire confesses everything to Jamie after they flee Cranesmuir, telling him about her time-travel and why she is not technically a witch. Jamie accepts everything, and takes Claire to Craigh na Dun; he urges her to return to the twentieth century. She is torn between going back to Frank, from whom she has been missing for almost six months, and staying with Jamie, whom she has come to passionately love. With a great deal of torment, she eventually chooses to stay with Jamie, and he takes her to Lallybroch.
Lallybroch and the Events AfterEdit
Upon reaching Lallybroch, Claire meets Jamie's sister, Janet (called Jenny), who is enormously pregnant and has a small child, named James, after his uncle. Jamie, thinking that Jenny was raped by Jack Randall several years before, accuses her of standing as the Captain's "doxy," and a terrible fight ensues. Claire escapes from the room and meets Jenny's husband, Jamie's best friend, Ian Murray: the two immediately like one another, and manage to settle their respective spouses down.
Claire becomes fast friends with Jenny, and happily settles into Lallybroch. But Jamie is taken by the Black Watch when out with Ian: Claire, after giving Jenny advice to "plant potatoes" in preparation for the events after Culloden, teams up with Murtagh to try and find where Jamie was taken. Dougal finds them, and informs them that Jamie is in Wentworth Prison awaiting execution. He also reveals his lust for Claire, and offers to marry her after Jamie is dead. Claire of course rejects this, and along with Rupert and Murtagh concocts a plan to rescue him from the prison.
Claire sneaks into the prison and finds Jamie in a small room, already suffering from torture by Jack Randall. She has almost freed Jamie from the room when Randall himself enters with a servant, and holds Claire at knife point; Jamie promises to resist neither Randall's sexual advances nor his torture, in exchange for Claire's freedom. She is thrown out the back door of the castle, and narrowly escapes being eaten by wolves before being rescued by a local Scot, Sir Marcus MacRannoch.
MacRannoch turns out to have been an erstwhile courtier of Jamie's mother, Ellen MacKenzie, and upon Murtagh's and Rupert's arrival, agrees to help rescue Jamie. The Scots release a large herd of cows into the same door through which Claire exited, and in the ensuing stampede Jamie is found and brought unconscious to MacRannoch's house, having been further raped and tortured by Randall.
Claire manages to doctor the Jamie's injuries, the worst of which his badly broken hand. They depart for France; between his injuries, being waylaid on the road, suffering through terrible seasickness on the Channel, Jamie is seriously ill by the time they reach the Abbe de Ste. Anne de Beauprais, where his uncle, the Abbott, grants them sanctuary. During Jamie's illness, Claire befriends the Benedictine monk Father Anselm, who counsels her in the religious aspects of marriage: she also confesses her true past to him.
Jamie suffers terribly from the memories of being raped by Jack Randall; he asks Claire to leave him and return to Scotland, since he can't think of her without remembering Randall. But before he can force her to go, Jamie's hand becomes infected. In the subsequent delerium of fever he asks Claire to let him die, which he later admits was because he thought she would amputate the hand. "Damned if I will," Claire says; using opium and the memories of Frank Randall as shock treatment, she brings him through the fever and into convalescance. The novel ends with Jamie recovering from his illness and planning to take Claire to Paris, and her confession that she is pregnant.
Events of Dragonfly in Amber (Paris)Edit
Jamie and Claire go to Paris, armed with her knowledge that Charles Stuart will invade Scotland and begin the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion in less than two years; their aim is to prevent him from gathering enough financial support in France to begin the uprising.
Meeting Charles Stuart and befriending Louis de la Tour. Fergus.
Mary Hawkins and Alex Randall; Master Raymond and the Comte Ste. Germain.
L'Hopital; meeting Jack Randall again; losing Faith.
Getting Jamie out of jail; reuniting; going back to Scotland.
Lallybroch; the Jacobite Rebellion; Jack Randall again; Dougal's death and Culloden.
Return to the Twentieth CenturyEdit
Claire returns to the year 1947, and is found wandering incoherently near Craigh na Dun. Frank honorably takes her back in, despite the fact that she is pregnant with another man's child. But their marriage suffers terribly, since Claire still desperately loves Jamie.
Brianna's childhood and Claire in medical school.
Frank's death; taking Brianna to Scotland.
Researching with Roger, and finding out about Jamie.
Events of Voyager (Scotland, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean)Edit
Claire successfully finds herself in the eighteenth century again, and makes her way to Edinburgh to find a printer named Alexander Malcolm.
Adventures in Edinburgh.
Returning to Lallybroch; Laoghaire and Ian's kidnapping.
Adventures on the ship
The Porpoise and meeting John Grey
Escape, the mangroves and meeting Lawrence Sterne; finding Jamie and the others again
Finding Geilie, learning about Willie, the confrontation with Geilie, and shipwreck
Events of Drums of Autumn (North Carolina)Edit
Jamie and Claire, having found themselves and their companions in the New World, immediately set about changing the gems taken from Geilie into more spendable capital. Jamie speaks with Governor Martin about the sale of the stones, and learns that a man can take possession of hundreds of acres in the back forests of the state if he swears an oath to the Crown.
Jocasta and River Run.
Establishing Fraser's Ridge.
Random events.
Arrival of Brianna.
Trying to get Roger back.
The family as a whole.
Events of The Fiery Cross (North Carolina)Edit
The novel begins with a double wedding: that of Jocasta and Duncan, and that of Roger and Brianna, whose time for handfasting has almost ended. Claire is acting as host to a large group of Scots, as well as fighting for position as head physician.
Events of A Breath of Snow and Ashes (North Carolina)Edit
With Ian having returned, Claire and Jamie begin to contemplate the complications of the oncoming American Revolution.
Events of An Echo in the Bone (North Carolina, New York, Scotland, and Pennsylvania)Edit
Claire and Jamie reluctantly leave Fraser's Ridge, planning to take Ian back to his parents in Scotland, fetch Jamie's printing press, and return to live peacefully in some city until the end of the Revolution, living as simple printers. The plan, of course, does not work perfectly.
