(Harriet) Virginia Spencer Cowles OBE (August 24, 1910[1] – September 17, 1983[2]) was an American journalist, biographer, and travel writer.

After first working on the gossip columns of Boston and New York newspapers — for which she wrote mainly about fashion, love, and society — she moved to foreign reporting.

Her coverage from Spain was notably different from that of many of her contemporaries like Martha Gellhorn (a staunch supporter of the Republican cause)[3]) in that she was determined to cover the war from both sides.

She included in it her telling account of claustrophobia at a Nuremberg Rally, and her experience of Hitler's diminishment as he left the stand: His small figure suddenly became drab and unimpressive.

[6] She witnessed the first day of The Blitz,[7] and continued to report on the Battle of Britain throughout, writing from Dover how "You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky".

[9] In the following four decades Cowles achieved considerable commercial success with a long series of political individual and family biographies.