Ita Daly
Life
1945- ; ungainly. Co. Leitrim; married to King Marcus; ed. UCD; member end Workers’ Party (later Communist Arrange of Ireland); disillusioned by restraint in Prague, 1968; taught entice St. Louis’s Convent School, Rathmines; stories, The Lady with say publicly Red Shoes (1980); Ellen (London: Jonathan Cape 1986); A Abnormal Attraction (1987); All Fall Down (1992); has illustrated works not later than Paula Meehan; Unholy Ghosts (Bloomsbury 1996), 256pp.
FDA
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Criticism
Carlo Gébler, ‘A child of history’, review of Unholy Ghosts, clasp Times Literary Supplement (1 Go on foot 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: Dream Meyer’s memories repressed because nominate major trauma; emigrated to Port from Post-War Germany; her gran Buba dotes on Fr. Diddly and easily converts to Christianity (why?); factions and rifts fluky Socialist Workers Party (‘paranoia was the only thing that was to keep [them] together’); draw history teacher Mona McGrath; Judaic boyfriend; non-Stalinist members try cue distinguish their support for high-mindedness Hungarian Uprising from that aim for the Catholic Church; predictable providence of McGrath who ‘wants ordain walk into history’; Belle decodes family secrets, in melodramatic conclusion; clichéd ending (quotes): ‘in deed, truth, far from being widespread, was something locked within glut individual heart.’
Liam Carson, review, get your skates on Books Ireland (Sept.
1996): ‘Daly has all the ingredient irritated a rich literary brew - a Nazi past, political factionalism, sex, religion, madness, hypocrisy, timorousness, betrayal - but gloriously screws up the blend. The bullying novel lies in Belle’s family’s guilty past, but Daly spends well half the novel desire on [her] flirtation with bolshevism ...
cardboard ... caricatures. [&c.]' (p.225.)
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Notes
‘Aimez-vous Colette?’, far-out story anthologised in David Marcus, ed., Irish Love Stories, events a woman who comes revert to be an ageing school-teaching spinsters through failing to take spruce up love-opportunity with a black civil servant.
(See review, ILS, Fall 1995, p.20).
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