Mary Caroline Moorman (19 February 1905 - 21 January 1994) was a British historian and biographer.

Life

She was born Mary Caroline Trevelyan, the daughter of the renowned Cambridge historian

G. M. Trevelyan George Macaulay Trevelyan (16 February 1876 – 21 July 1962) was a British historian and academic. He was a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1898 to 1903. He then spent more than twenty years as a full-time author. He returned to the ...

. She studied at

Somerville College, Oxford Somerville College, a constituent college of the University of Oxford in England, was founded in 1879 as Somerville Hall, one of its first two women's colleges. Among its alumnae have been Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Dorothy Hodgkin, Ir ...

. In 1930, she published ''William III and the Defence of Holland, 1672-44.'' That same year, she married

John Moorman John Richard Humpidge Moorman, (born Leeds, Yorkshire, England, 4 June 1905; died Durham, England, 13 January 1989) was an English divine, ecumenist and writer who was Bishop of Ripon from 1959 to 1975. Early life and education Born in Leeds, the ...

, an

Anglican Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of th ...

cleric who rose to become the

Bishop of Ripon The Bishop of Ripon is an episcopal title which takes its name after the city of Ripon in North Yorkshire, England. The bishop is one of the area bishops of the Diocese of Leeds in the Province of York. The area bishop of Ripon has oversight of ...

. She is best known today for her two-volume biography of the poet

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication ''Lyrical Ballads'' (1798). Wordsworth's ' ...

. The first volume came out in 1957, followed by a second volume in 1966. The latter won the

James Tait Black Memorial Prize The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Unit ...

for biography. She was also closely involved with the

Wordsworth Trust The Wordsworth Trust is an independent charity in the United Kingdom. It celebrates the life of the poet William Wordsworth, and looks after Dove Cottage in the Lake District village of Grasmere where Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy Wordswort ...

, serving first as secretary and then as chair of the trust. She died in 1994.

Works

* ''William the Third and the defence of Holland, 1672-4,'' London, New York Longmans, Green and Co., 1934. * ''William Wordsworth : a biography'', Clarendon Press, 1957-1965. * ''George Macaulay Trevelyan : a memoir'', London : H. Hamilton, 1980. ,

References

Sources

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Moorman, Mary Caroline British biographers 1905 births 1994 deaths Alumni of Somerville College, Oxford 20th-century English historians