While the monks turned up cheerfully at the launch party, 15 members of Gill’s family boycotted the event and subsequently subjected her to a “barrage of letters and phone calls” describing their hurt and anger and threatening legal action.Īrt-lovers, too, protested that Gill’s work had been ruined for them by inappropriate details of his private life, and affronted Roman Catholics rushed into print. Nothing prepared Fiona MacCarthy for the fury which erupted on publication.
When advance copies of the book were sent to Gill’s family and elderly monks who had known him, the reaction was positive. But Fiona MacCarthy began her research well after Michael Holroyd’s life of Lytton Strachey had altered the ground rules, making discussion of subjects’ sex lives almost de rigueur.
Other biographers of Gill in the 1960s had seen the same material, but had decided not to inform their readers about Gill’s less savoury quirks. The diaries documented these liaisons, sometimes with little diagrams, in the same matter-of-fact tone in which Gill, a convert to Roman Catholicism much feted by the Church establishment, would mention that compline had been sung, and alongside sketches of religious carvings. Her 1989 biography of Gill, her first full-length book, caused a sensation by breaking the news of the artist’s unorthodox sexual habits, as detailed in his diaries – numerous adulterous affairs, incest with his sisters and his two daughters and even sexual experimentation with the family dog. Fiona MacCarthy, who has died aged 80, was a journalist and an authority on the British Arts and Crafts movement she wrote acclaimed biographies of, among others, William Morris, Lord Byron and Eric Gill.
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