ELLA D’ARCY
(c. 1856?57?–5 September 1937)
Chris Snodgrass © 2015
Ella D’Arcy (born Constance Eleanor Mary Byrne D’Arcy) was felt to be one of
the most talented and promising writers whose work appeared in famous The Yellow Book,
the nineties “illustrated quarterly” that was one of the most
illustrious literary magazines of the nineteenth century. In fact, her
work appeared in ten of the journal’s thirteen issues. Her
unsentimental short stories, which cast a sharp and critical eye on
modern male-female relationships, engaged many of the fin-desiècle controversies over gender, sexuality, courtship, marriage,
and art. She was considered by a number of her contemporaries on
both sides of the Atlantic to be among the innovators of “New”
fiction of the early to mid 1890s, owing to her vexing,
psychologically realist short stories that were somewhat
reminiscent of Henry James and often “modern” in both content
Ella D’Arcy
and style.
One of the most elusive writers of the 1890s, very little is
known of D’Arcy’s life apart from her involvement as contributor and assistant editor of
The Yellow Book. She was born in London to aristocratic Irish parents in 1856 or 1857
(the precise date has not been documented), one of nine children and the oldest of five
daughters. Her mother was the former Sophia Anne Byrne, and her father Anthony Byrne
D’Arcy was a partner in the firm of Patrick and Anthony D’Arcy, malt and corn
merchants. She spent much of her early life in the Channel Islands, an influence that
shows up in stories like “White Magic.” She was also educated in France and Germany
and later attended the Slade School of Art in London until deficient eyesight made a
career as an artist impossible. Her work for The Yellow Book brought her into contact with
many of the most interesting writers and artists of the nineties, not least novelist and
editor Henry Harland and publisher John Lane, reportedly having affairs with both, among
others. But she also published in journals like Temple Bar, Blackwood’s Magazine,
Century Magazine, Argosy, Living Age, and even Dickens’s All the Year Round (a few
under the pseudonym “Gilbert H. Page”). Recognition of her work took off when
“Irremediable” appeared in the first issue of The Yellow Book, the Saturday Review
praising its “delicate irony”: “We doubt if any other living writer could have written quit
so well.” (Ironically, the story was initially rejected by Blackwood’s Magazine for not
displaying a proper respect for marriage.) Lane published her acclaimed collection of
short stories Monochromes (1895) as part his prestigious Keynotes series (named after
George Egerton’s landmark volume), and he went on to similarly publish her second, in
some respects perhaps even more accomplished, collection of stories Modern Instances
(1898), as well as her novel The Bishop’s Dilemma (1898), under the famous Bodley Head
imprimatur. Her later work is less ruthlessly naturalistic than much of her early-nineties
Snodgrass, D’Arcy Introduction 2
stories; in the later works she generally increases her use of symbols, demonstrating the
influence of the French Symbolists whom she admired and prefiguring some of the
propensities of Modernist fiction.
A procrastinator inclined to be easily discouraged by adverse criticism, D’Arcy
wrote very slowly even in her most productive periods, and despite her obvious talent, she
apparently published little or nothing after 1910. She wrote a longer novel, which Arnold
Bennett liked but which was rejected by at least one publisher and never appeared. She
prepared both a biography and a translation of Rimbaud some years before the French
poet became the rage; but once again, the works found no publisher and she gave up the
project. In 1924, at John Lane’s request, she translated into English André Maurois’s
Ariel, his fictionalized biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley, having given up on the notion
of writing her own Shelley biography. Her friend Netta Syrett, an active novelist in the
early twentieth century, attributed D’Arcy’s small body of published work to inveterate
laziness, but it is likelier that a combination of high standards, perfectionism, and
hypersensitivity to rejection accounts for her relatively small output. She was notorious
for her blasé attitude about keeping up with friends, exacerbated no doubt by her love of
travel. Her practice of popping up unannounced earned her the nickname “Goblin Ella.”
Although “a bright and witty talker” and much fancied—Charlotte Mew, one of the better
poets of the late-Victorian and early-twentieth century, was said to have fallen in love
with her—D’Arcy preferred living alone, never marrying. While the facts about her life
are distinctly sketchy, she was described by contemporaries as an entertaining,
warmhearted, and free-spirited woman. She lived the latter part of her life chiefly in Paris,
much of it haunted by significant money worries and living always in temporary quarters,
usually cheap boardinghouses. She eventually returned to London in 1937, dying in Kent
in September of that year.
Although D’Arcy wrote relatively little and has been, since the fin de siècle,
largely ignored except by scholars specializing in late-Victorian literature, D’Arcy
contributed in important ways to the late-nineteenth-century debate about relations
between the sexes, and her stylistically economical work is of a quality and subtlety far
exceeding the modest attention it has thus far received. Like George Egerton, her work
reflects a strong feminist perspective, although at times differing sharply from Egerton’s
in tone and characterization. D’Arcy’s work examines romantic idealism with
considerable ironic astringency—the Bookman, while praising her work, nonetheless
shuddered that she made some characters “too real”—and unlike many feminist writers,
she did not write of the pathos of the woman in a man’s world, and women are not spared
from her often harsh view, being sometimes depicted as predatory before marriage and
cruelly tyrannical afterwards.” However, her characters are frequently portrayed as the
victims of the institutions of society or of human greed and selfishness; in seven of her
stories the institution of marriage is depicted as inflicting misery on both husbands and
wives. Her depictions of the spiritual shallowness of middle-class Victorian women and
their values often seem not so much attacks on innate deficiencies of bourgeois British
women as revelation of the social conditions that can turn a female into a “trivial though
terrible harpy.
Snodgrass, D’Arcy Introduction 3
D’Arcy’s stories, which occasionally delve into folkloric fantasy and show
experimentation with a variety of narrative techniques, were perfectly suited to such
avant-garde vehicles as The Yellow Book, whose stated aim was “to preserve a delicate,
decorous, and reticent mien and conduct . . . [and] at the same time have the courage of its
modernness.” Many of her works also explore the loneliness, isolation, and alienation of
modern life. In several stories (such as “The Death Mask” and “The Villa of Lucienne”)
she investigates shifting subjectivity and the role of the artistic sensibility. Her novelette
The Bishop’s Dilemma (1898) laments the division between spirituality and sensuality,
ironically undercutting the opinion that death is better than endangering the soul.
Sensitive to the complexities of her age, her themes are those found often in the writing of
the 1890s; and, of course, her work readily shows the influences of contemporary
feminism and psychology, as well as the influence her works had on those fields.