Fiona Caroline MacCarthy OBE (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.
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.
[5] 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.
[2] 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.
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.
Her biography William Morris: A Life for our Time (1994) was winner of the Wolfson History Prize and the Writers' Guild Non-fiction Award.