On this day in 1989, novelist and playwright Una Troy opened the ‘About Tipperary’ Literary Festival at Clonmel Library. It was a return home of sorts for Troy who had spent much of her life in Clonmel.
Although her work was well-known in Ireland, Troy was far more widely-known in Europe. Her works were translated into German, Dutch,Danish, Flemish, Slovene and more. She enjoyed particular success in Germany and writing in The Nationalist after Troy’s death in 1993, Margaret Rossiter noted that, while on holidays in Nuremburg some months previously, she saw a shelf-full of Troy’s books there. She saw something similar at a Copenhagen news stand shortly after. Furthermore, an unpublished novel discovered after her death was interesting published posthumously in German, but not in English.
In Ireland however, Troy’s novel “Dead Stars’ Light”immediately found its way onto the list of banned books when it was first published in 1938 under the pseudonym ‘Elizabeth Connor’. While reading an‘illegal’ copy as a schoolgirl in the 1940s, Rossiter could not fathom why it should have been banned at all. Perhaps because of its ‘sombre, stark and desolate’ depiction of Irish life.
In 1940, still writing as Elizabeth Connor, Troy won the Abbey Theatre’s prize for her play “Mount Prospect” and for the next seven years, shehad a play on the at the Abbey almost as an annual event. These plays included“Swans and Geese”, “An Apple a Day” and “The Dark Road”.
She abandoned her pseudonym in 1955 and under her own nameof Una Troy, she started on what might be described as the second phase of her writing career. In contrast to the sombreness of her first novel, she showed an easy facility for writing light comedy and tragi-comedy. Her first book in this new genre was entitled ‘We Are Seven’, a story of a woman who had seven children by seven different fathers. It contained many parallels with the life of Moll McCarthy, a New Inn woman who was murdered in the early 1940s. Troy's father had dismissed a 1926 application for McCarthy's children to be sent to institutions and presided at the initial committal proceedings for Harry Gleeson (1903–41), convicted and hanged for the murder in what was later acknowledged to have been a miscarriage of justice.
‘We Are Seven’ proved so popular in America that it went through twenty reprints. It was later turned into a film, for which she co-wrote the script. However, filming was transferred from Connemara to Cornwall owing to local clerical opposition and the film was banned in Ireland.The film was believed lost, but was rediscovered in 2002 and restored in 2005.It has since attracted considerable attention owing to its cast of prominent Irish actors and later revelations about the dark underbelly of post-independence Ireland.
Writing in The Dictionary of Irish Biography, Patrick Maume writes of Troy’s writing: “Troy is a complex writer who should not be dismissed as a facile middlebrow or celebrated for unequivocal self-empowerment. Her work is notable for its witty, incisive and subversive social criticism and its struggle to use escapism to contain undercurrents of anger, frustration and despair.”
Troy passed away on 27 September 1993 in Waterford and is buried beside her parents in Kilcrumper cemetery near Fermoy.
Sources:
Margaret Rossiter writing in The Nationalist, 30/10/1993,pg8.
https://www.dib.ie/biography/troy-una-elizabeth-connor-a9942
