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Meriol Trevor was one of the most prolific Roman Catholic women writers of the twentieth century. She was educated at Perse Girls' School, Cambridge, and St Hugh's College, Oxford, taking her degree in 1942. During World War II she worked in a day nursery and later as the steerer of a cargo barge on the Grand Union Canal. In 1946 she went to Italy as a relief worker with UNRRA and lived for nearly a year in the Abruzzi. In Italy Trevor was exposed to Catholic culture. Previously an agnostic humanist, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church at Oxford in 1950. Her two-volume biography of John Henry Newman was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography in 1962. She also wrote biographies of Pope John XXIII, Philip Neri, and James II, as well as many historical novels and children's stories and a book of poetry. In 1967 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. An annual lecture series in her honour was begun in 2000 in her home town of Bath.
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