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Life
1945- ; b. Co. Leitrim; married to David Marcus; ed. UCD; member of Workers’ Party (later Communist Party of Ireland); disillusioned by repression in Prague, 1968; taught at St. Louis’s Convent School, Rathmines; stories, The Lady with the Red Shoes (1980); Ellen (London: Jonathan Cape 1986); A Singular Attraction (1987); All Fall Down (1992); has illustrated works of Paula Meehan; Unholy Ghosts (Bloomsbury 1996), 256pp. FDA
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Criticism
Carlo Gébler, ‘A child of history’, review of Unholy Ghosts, in Times Literary Supplement (1 March 1996), p.24. See other reviews in Commentary, infra.
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Commentary
Katie Donovan reviews Unholy Ghosts (Bloomsbury), in The Irish Times (23 Feb. 1996), Weekend, p.8: Belle Meyer’s memories repressed because of major trauma; emigrated to Dublin from Post-War Germany; her grandmother Buba dotes on Fr. Jack and easily converts to Catholicism (why?); factions and rifts in Socialist Workers Party (‘paranoia was the only thing that was to keep [them] together’); her history teacher Mona McGrath; Jewish boyfriend; non-Stalinist members try to distinguish their support for the Hungarian Uprising from that for the Catholic Church; predictable fate of McGrath who ‘wants to walk into history’; Belle decodes family secrets, in melodramatic conclusion; clichéd ending (quotes): ‘in fact, truth, far from being universal, was something locked within each individual heart.’
Liam Carson, review, in Books Ireland (Sept. 1996): ‘Daly has all the ingredient for a rich literary brew - a Nazi past, political factionalism, sex, religion, madness, hypocrisy, cowardice, betrayal - but gloriously screws up the blend. The real novel lies in Belle’s family’s guilty past, but Daly spends well half the novel focusing on [her] flirtation with socialism ... cardboard ... caricatures. [&c.]' (p.225.)
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Notes
‘Aimez-vous Colette?’, a story anthologised in David Marcus, ed., Irish Love Stories, concerns a woman who comes to be an ageing school-teaching spinsters through failing to take a love-opportunity with a black man. (See review, ILS, Fall 1995, p.20).
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