Dorothy Macardle - teacher, playwright, journalist and novelist - is best known as the author of The Irish Republic (1937), the first history of the revolutionary period from an anti-Treaty perspective, and novels The Uninvited (1942) and The Unforeseen (1946), re-released recently by Tramp Press to critical acclaim. The manner in which The Irish Republic endorsed de Valera's decisions during the 1930s has allowed many of Macardle's contemporaries to view her as merely his adjunct or mouthpiece. Yet Macardle, as Leeann Lane reveals in this biography, was beholden to no male politician.
Despite the fact that, in many ways, Macardle had a supportive relationship with de Valera on a political level, the often fractious nature of their relationship symbolises the uneasy position of women within a patriarchal nationalist culture. Central to this book is an analysis of the commitment of Macardle to female activist politics, often in subterranean or subversive ways. Macardle's opposition to the position of women in the 1937 Constitution was not overt but contained within her range of gothic novels published in the 1940s.
This biography places Macardle in the context of her republicanism after 1916 and later within the politics and religious ethos of the post-colonial state - revealing a determined, intelligent and independently minded woman.
