Stella’s bedroom is a Marian shrine – in both senses of the word: “Pale blue walls – her mother’s favourite colour. Stella’s fascination with Mary allows Macardle to explore the dark side of the blind veneration of a saintly mother figure. Six years earlier, a couple lived there, but left after having “experienced disturbances”. Mary and Carmel both died tragically at Cliff End, and Stella was brought up by her grandfather. Its previous residents were the owner’s daughter Mary, her artist husband Lyn, their small daughter Stella, and Lyn’s model and mistress, Carmel. But when they make enquiries about purchasing it, the owner tells them that it's been empty for 15 years.

In it, two Anglo-Irish siblings, Roddy and Pamela Fitzgerald, find an enchanting house for sale in Devon called Cliff End. So perhaps it’s not surprising that, a few years later, she wrote an excellent novel that shows just how unhealthy it can be to idolise women as pure domestic goddesses.įirst published in 1942, Uneasy Freehold has been reissued as the second in Tramp Press's brilliant Recovered Voices series, The Uninvited (its American title). Macardle, like many other Republican feminists, was appalled by the decision to enshrine the domestic role of women in the Constitution. “As the Constitution stands,” she wrote, “I do not see how anyone holding advanced views on the rights of women can support it, and that is a tragic dilemma for those who have been loyal and ardent workers in the national cause.” After the Irish Constitution was introduced in 1937, the writer and activist Dorothy Macardle wrote to her good friend, Éamon de Valera, to tell him what she thought of it.

The uninvited book dorothy macardle