FIDELIS MORGAN was born in a red gypsy caravan, Kiomi Romani, in an orchard halfway between Stonehenge and Woodhenge.
Her parents, just arrived from Liverpool, believed in education in the widest sense, and enjoyed picking up waifs and strays. Once the family moved to a house it was not only crammed with animals (cats, dogs, chickens, geese, goats and foxes) but an endless stream of eccentric characters: boisterous painters who picked up women in the street to pose nude in the living room, musicians who battered away on milk bottles, the disgraced son of a local Earl, an Irish builder who had won and lost a million three times over and a bearded man who wore her mother's underwear and did the cleaning while Mae West records played. There was even a famous cat-burglar, who was proudly paraded at school sports day.
Fidelis survived school, despite being jeered at for her northern accent, and being expelled a number of times.
During her school holidays she spent most of the time living in Paris where her mother sometimes worked as a painter on the Butte, Montmartre. Fidelis regularly earned enough money painting clowns and playing the guitar.
She gained an honours degree at Birmingham University, where she contributed to some important research on Restoration Theatre. Her finals papers were on Restoration London and the world of the 17th century theatre, which led to her writing the ground-breaking book THE FEMALE WITS, which rediscovered the long lost women playwrights of the Restoration and brought those lost plays to light for the first time in 300 years. She followed up with numerous scholarly anthologies and biographies of people and works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including A WOMAN OF NO CHARACTER, and The WELL-KNOWN TROUBLEMAKER. Fidelis has lectured at universities across the world, from Stanford University to the University of Utrecht.
Fidelis also works as a professional actor. Her screen appearances include Jeeves and Wooster, As Time Goes By, Mr Majeika, Dead Gorgeous, Big Women and Never Let Me Go. She has played leading roles by Brecht, Chekhov, Wilde, Coward, Lorca, Orton, Shaw, Genet, Goldoni, Massinger & Schiller, in companies like West Yorkshire Playhouse, Nottingham Playhouse, Liverpool Everyman, Paines Plough and particularly the Glasgow Citizens, where her work won her a Best Actress nomination in The Observer.
As a playwright, Fidelis's adaptation of Samuel Richardson's PAMELA won her a nomination as Most Promising Playwright, and was described in The Guardian as "a new eighteenth century play", while her adaptation of Patrick Hamilton's HANGOVER SQUARE played for an extended run at the Lyric Hammersmith, where it acquired cult status, and wa revived to great acclaim at the Finborough Theatre.
Her four murder mysteries, featuring The Countess Ashby dela Zouche and her maid Alpiew, are acclaimed throughout the world and have not only been translated into many languages but are the subject of a critical academic study.
She has a new short story collection TRIPLE SHORTS and a modern novel, MURDER QUADRILLE available for Kindle and download to computers.
"FIDELIS MORGAN - This uniquely creative, stylish, multi-gifted woman" - Plays International
