Fiona Maccarthy: 5 books

Fiona MacCarthy makes a breakthrough in interpreting Byron's life and poetry drawing on John Murray's world-famous archive. She brings a fresh eye to his early years: his childhood in Scotland, embattled relations with his mother, the effect of his deformed foot on his development. She traces...

The Simple Life (1981) was Fiona MacCarthy's first book, written while she was the Guardian's design correspondent (and before her acclaimed lives of Eric Gill, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones.) It tells of a venturesome effort to enact an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds. The...

In Fiona MacCarthy’s riveting account, Burne-Jones’s exchange of faith for art places him at the intersection of the nineteenth century and the Modern, as he leads us forward from Victorian mores and attitudes to the psychological, sexual, and artistic audacity that would characterize the early twentieth century.

Fiona MacCarthy challenges the image of Walter Gropius as a doctrinaire architectural rationalist, bringing out the vision and courage that carried him through a politically hostile age. Approaching the Bauhaus founder from all angles, she offers a poignant personal story, one that reexamines the urges that drove Euro-American modernism as a whole.

Eric Gill was perhaps the greatest English artist-craftsman of the twentieth century: a typographer and lettercutter of genius and a master in the art of sculpture and wood-engraving. 'A wonderfully detailed account of his personality - so vivid, you feel you know just what it would have been...