Фиона Маккарти: Жизнь и творчество британского биографа

British biographer (1940–2020)

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.

Fiona MacCarthy was born in Sutton, Surrey 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. She contributed to TV and radio arts programmes.

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 March 2019.

Her first marriage to Ian White Thompson ended in divorce. In 1966, she married the Sheffield based silversmith and cutlery designer David Mellor. Fiona MacCarthy died on 29 February 2020, aged 80.