Fiona MacCarthy

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fiona MacCarthy OBE (born 1940) is a British biographer and cultural historian best known for her studies of 19th and 20th century arts, crafts and design.

Early life and education

Fiona MacCarthy was born into an atmosphere of wealth and privilege, from which she spent much of her life escaping. Her father, an army officer, was killed in World War II when she was a child of three. She spent her early childhood in London. Her grandmother, the Baroness de Belabre, was a daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine who built and owned the Dorchester Hotel and much of her childhood was spent in the hotel, living the life of Eloise at the Plaza. The hotel's concrete construction was said to make it bomb-proof and her whole family, as well as leading politicians, socialites and military commanders, took refuge in the Dorchester during the Blitz.

She was educated at Wycombe Abbey School.[1] In 1958, the final year of this 200 year old ritual, she was presented to the Queen, an experience she recounts in her 2007 memoir, Last Curtsey: the End of the Debutantes. She was one of only four of that year's debutantes to go on to university, in her case taking a degree in English Literature at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.

Career

She started her career on the Guardian in the 1960s as a features writer and columnist before becoming a biographer and critic. She first came to fame as a biographer with a controversial study of the Roman Catholic craftsman and sculptor Eric Gill. MacCarthy is well known for her arts essays and reviews, appearing regularly in The Guardian,[2] the Times Literary Supplement and The New York Review of Books. She contributes frequently to TV and radio arts programmes.

Personal life

Her first marriage, to a business executive, 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. They had two children Corin and Clare, both of whom have now become designers. After suffering for some years from dementia David Mellor died in May 2009.

Awards and honours

She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1997),[3] an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art. In 1987 the Royal Society of Arts awarded her the Bicentenary Medal for services to art and design.

MacCarthy was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2009 Birthday Honours.[4] She holds honorary doctorates from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University. She is president of the Twentieth Century Society and a vice-president of the Victorian Society.

Her biography William Morris: A Life for our Time 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. She is now writing a life of Walter Gropius.

Works

She has always been especially interested in the meeting point between the visual and verbal. Counter-culture movements have fascinated her and she has written widely on the idealistic arts and crafts communities that followed on from William Morris. Her approach to biography has been in concentrating on a single central figure as a means to opening out a whole, richly complex social and intellectual scene.

Exhibitions

She has curated the following exhibitions:

References

  1. ↑ Paul Laity. The Guardian, 2 Sept 2011. "A life in writing: Fiona MacCarthy"
  2. ↑ Profile on The Guardian site
  3. ↑ "Royal Society of Literature All Fellows". Royal Society of Literature. Retrieved 10 August 2010. 
  4. ↑ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 59090. p. 11. 13 June 2009.

Further reading

  • Fiona MacCarthy: The Last Debutante by Matthew J Reisz, The Independent, 6 October 2006
  • Fiona MacCarthy: A Life in Writing by Paul Laity, The Guardian, 2 September 2011

External links

Authority control
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike; additional terms may apply for the media files.