Diane Mary Chase was born in the USA on 10 November 1934, the first child of Ted and Marcella (Dolan) Chase of Sun Prairie. Graduating from high school in 1952, she then attended St Mary's Dominican College in New Orleans and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1954 she married Frank Worzala, with whom she had nine children. She later returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, finishing her undergraduate degree in 1972, taking an MA in British History in 1974, and receiving her PhD in modern British history in 1982 for her thesis on the Langham Place Circle. She taught at the University of Notre Dame and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaching modern European women's history and a popular history mystery class. Her major research interests lay in the history of 19th and 20thC Britain and she presented many conference papers on various aspects of the Victorian women's movement, on British women in history and on British women historians. She travelled widely for personal reasons and for research, including several periods of research on British women's history at Girton College in the late 1970s and the 1980s. She died on 9 February 2007.