She earned a First in Classics and Modern History at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where A. L. Rowse said she was "my first outstanding pupil".

Her work in continental European history included the major study The Thirty Years War (1938) and biographies of William the Silent and Cardinal Richelieu.

Instead, "what was remarkable about Wedgwood's view of the Civil War was the way in which she depicted the sheer confusion of it all, the impossibility of co-ordinating events in three countries, once order from the centre had broken down".

[2] Of William the Silent (1944), Rowse wrote that she "displayed not only a mastery of research but maturity of judgement, with a literary capacity not common in academic writing.

She wrote indeed to be read, and not surprisingly the book began for her a long procession of prizes and honours..."[2] The New York Times singled it out as a landmark: "Miracles do happen.

A generation ago the young English woman historian was often tethered to a dry theme until she had nibbled it bald.

Today she dares much more to select a major subject", and praised her scholarship for balancing complex details with human drama: "Miss Wedgwood has not faltered before the intricacy or magnitude of this checkered struggle, and hers is a glowing, substantial, ingeniously organized book.

She published using her initials C.V. as a nom de plume to disguise her gender, aware of prejudice against women as serious historians.

"[12] She replied to critics of her attention to biography and the role of the individual in history:[10] The individual—stupendous and beautiful paradox—is at once infinitesimal dust and the cause of all things.

I prefer this overestimate to the opposite method which treats developments as though they were the massive anonymous waves of an inhuman sea or pulverizes the fallible surviving records of human life into the grey dust of statistics.Her biographies and narrative histories are said to have "provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works".

[13] By 1966 her reputation and notoriety were sufficient to allow the authors of a study of The Nature of Narrative to invoke her name in reference to the tradition of historical scholarship: "... medieval traditional poetic narratives contained allusions to verifiable historical events [although] their history was not such as Tacitus, Bede, or C. V. Wedgwood might have written.

[10] Garrett Mattingly praised the essays in Truth and Opinion (1960) for "displaying (or concealing, rather, but always molded and controlled by) that exquisite sense of form, in a medium apparently almost formless, which is the first-rate essayist's most precious gift.

[19] In 1966 she was one of 49 writers who signed a letter appealing to the Soviet Union for the release of Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel from imprisonment based on the "literary and artistic merits" of their work and rejecting the characterisation of it as "propaganda".

[21] Wedgwood was a lesbian: her partner of almost seventy years, Jacqueline Hope-Wallace (died 2011), was a fellow graduate of Lady Margaret Hall and had a significant career in the British civil service.

[2] She received honorary degrees from the universities of Glasgow and Sheffield and from Smith College, and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1952 to 1966.