Veronica Wedgwood

Dame Cicely Veronica Wedgwood, (20 July 1910 – 9 March 1997) was an English historian who published under the name C. V. Wedgwood. Specializing in the history of 17th-century England and continental Europe, her biographies and narrative histories are said to have provided a clear, entertaining middle ground between popular and scholarly works. Early life Wedgwood was born in Stocksfield, Northumberland, on 20 July 1910. She was the only daughter of Sir Ralph Wedgwood, Bt, a railway executive, and his wife Iris Wedgwood (née Pawson), a novelist and travel writer. Her brother was the politician and industrialist Sir John Wedgwood. Veronica Wedgwood was a great-great-great-granddaughter of the potter and abolitionist Josiah Wedgwood. Her uncle was the politician Josiah Wedgwood, later 1st Baron Wedgwood. She was educated at home, and then at Norland Place School. 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". In 1932, she enrolled for a PhD at the London School of Economics under the supervision of R. H. Tawney, but never completed it. Career Wedgwood published her first biography, Strafford, at the age of 25 and The Thirty Years War, "her big book ... covering a large canvas", according to Rowse, just three years later, a work Patrick Leigh Fermor called "[b]y far the best and most exciting book on the whole period".