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. 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. The Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. 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.

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