Fiona MacCarthy

Fiona Caroline MacCarthy (23 January 1940 – 29 February 2020) was a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th- and 20th-century art and design.

Early life and education

Fiona MacCarthy was born in Sutton, Surrey, in 1940, into an upper-class background, from which she spent much of her life escaping. Her father, Gerald MacCarthy, was an officer in the Royal Artillery and was killed in action in North Africa during the Second World War in 1943. Fiona MacCarthy, her sister and mother, Yolande, lived in London and then Scotland before returning to London. Her grandmother, the Baroness de Belabre, was a daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine, 1st Baronet, who built and owned the Dorchester Hotel, and much of her childhood was spent in the hotel. Supposedly safe from bombing raids, her family took refuge there during The Blitz.

MacCarthy was educated at Wycombe Abbey School. In 1958, after a spell in Paris, she was a debutante being presented to the Queen at Queen Charlotte's Ball in the final year of the 200-year-old ritual, an experience MacCarthy recounted in her memoir, ''Last Curtsey: the End of the Debutantes'' (2007). She was one of only four of that year's debutantes to go on to university, in her case studying for a degree in English literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Career

After graduation, MacCarthy's first job was as a merchandise editor and then journalist on '' House & Garden'' magazine. MacCarthy joined ''The Guardian'' in 1963 initially as an assistant to the women's editor Mary Stott. She was then appointed the newspaper's design correspondent, working as a features writer and columnist, sometimes using a pseudonymous byline to avoid two articles appearing in the same issue. In this role, she interviewed David Hockney, Betty Friedan and John Lennon among others. She left ''The Guardian'' in 1969, briefly becoming women's editor of the London ''Evening Standard'', before settling in Sheffield.

In Sheffield, MacCarthy became a biographer and critic. After writing a biography of the arts and crafts designer C. R. Ashbee, she came to wider attention as a biographer with a once-controversial study of the Roman Catholic craftsman and sculptor Eric Gill, first published in 1989. Subsequent biographies of Stanley Spencer in 1997 and of Byron in 2002 enhanced her reputation for undertaking detailed research into her subjects. MacCarthy was also known for her arts essays and reviews, which appeared in ''The Guardian'', ''The Times Literary Supplement'' and ''The New York Review of Books''. She contributed to TV and radio arts programmes.

Awards and honours

Fiona MacCarthy was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1997), an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art.

She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to literature in the 2009 Birthday Honours. She was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University and was awarded the Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Society of Arts.

Her biography ''William Morris: A Life for our Time'' (1994) was winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-fiction Award. ''The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination'' won the 2012 James Tait Black prize for Biography. Her life of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus, was published in 2019.

Personal life

Her first marriage to Ian White-Thompson ended in divorce. In 1966, she married the Sheffield-based silversmith and cutlery designer David Mellor. She first met him when she went to interview him for ''The Guardian'' in 1964. They had two children, Corin and Clare, both of whom have now become designers. After suffering from dementia for some years, Mellor died in May 2009.

Fiona MacCarthy died from multiple myeloma at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield on 29 February 2020, aged 80.

Works

*1972 ''All Things Bright and Beautiful: British Design 1830 to Today''
*1981 ''The Simple Life: C. R. Ashbee in the Cotswolds''
*1984 ''The Omega Workshops: Decorative Arts of Bloomsbury''
*1989 ''Eric Gill'' ()
*1994 ''William Morris: A Life for our Time'' ()
*1997 ''Stanley Spencer: An English Vision'' ()
*2002 ''Byron: Life and Legend'' ()
*2007 ''Last Curtsey: The End of the Debutantes'' ()
*2011 ''The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination'' ()
*2019 '' Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus '' ()

Exhibitions

She curated the following exhibitions:
*''Homespun to Highspeed: British Design 1860 to 1960'' for Sheffield Museums and Art Galleries, 1979
*''The Omega Workshops: Decorative Arts of Bloomsbury'' for the Crafts Council, 1984
*''Eye for Industry: retrospective of the Royal Designers'' for the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1986
*''Byron'' for the National Portrait Gallery, 2002
*''Anarchy and Beauty, William Morris and his Legacy'' for the National Portrait Gallery, 2014

References

External links

Official site at Lady Margaret Hall

{{DEFAULTSORT:Maccarthy, Fiona
1940 births
2020 deaths
20th-century English journalists
20th-century English women writers
21st-century English women writers
Alumni of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
British debutantes
Deaths from multiple myeloma in England
English biographers
Fellows of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford
Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
People educated at Wycombe Abbey
People from Hathersage
The Guardian people
Writers from Sheffield
Writers from the London Borough of Sutton
Wolfson History Prize winners