Invisible Ink 310: Dorothy Marcardle

Some of the clearest views of historical events come from non-academic observers. Dorothy Macardle became famous for her accounts of the Irish War of Independence and its aftermath.

Macardle was born into a rich ale-making family in Dundalk, Ireland, in 1889. In her youth she was fired from her teaching job for her antipathy to the treaty with Britain that ended the independence war. Following this, she was imprisoned by the new Free State government, and subsequently worked as a journalist with the League of Nations.

She was a lifelong champion (or apologist, depending on your point of view) for the controversial anti-Treaty leader Éamon de Valera. At the start of the 1920s she began dramatic writing, with works that included Tragedies of Kerry, Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland, and then The Irish Republic, a mammoth undertaking which became standard reading for students in many universities. Macardle willed the royalties from the book, which was often reprinted, to de Valera, who wrote its foreword.

She also wrote about the experiences of the children of liberated countries in Children of Europe (1949), along with other reflections on the Republic of Ireland, but there were novels, too. In 1940 Alfred Hitchcock (whose influence seems to touch many in this column) released the film version of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, which cast a long shadow over romantic mysteries written during the rest of the decade.

A year later, Macardle’s novel Uneasy Freehold was published, and it bears a distinct resemblance to Rebecca. A brother and sister move to a clifftop house with plenty of Gothic trappings and they experience icy apparitions, malevolent presences, hysteria, moans in the night, the sickly scent of mimosa, and all the ingredients of what would now be catalogued as “paranormal romance”.

It was filmed in 1944 with Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey, and adapted for the screen by Dodie Smith, best known for 101 Dalmatians. There’s a healthy feminist subtext to the book and film, although the censorship of the time forced elements from which the story derived much of its psychological power into the background.

However, enough remained to allow the film to became a cult hit with lesbian communities in wartime America.

Macardle wrote two more novels in this style, Dark Enchantment, set in Provence, and Fantastic Summer (titled The Unforeseen in the US), which are so rare now that they don’t even appear to exist online. One final book, Shakespeare, Man and Boy, appeared after her death in 1958.