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Ella D'Arcy: A Commentary with a Primary and Annotated Secondary Bibliography BENJAMIN FRANKLIN FISHER IV University of Mississippi ELLA D'ARCY, one of the most significant writers associated with The Yellow Book, and with the British short story in the 1890s, has never received anything like just dues from students of the era, from those concerned with British fiction, nor from those interested in the short story in general. T. Earle Welby, as "Stet" in the Saturday Review during the 1920s, tried to resuscitate her reputation, as evinced in entries cited below, and she receives mention, but generally little more than that, in a number of literary accounts of the nineties and of Edwardian years. We might well wonder how this author—repeatedly touted as a herald in the forefront of the "New," experimental, innovative fiction during the mid-1890s, and who was compared, frequently to what amounts to a disadvantage for them, with Hubert Crackanthorpe, George Egerton, Ethel Cobum Mayne, and Henry James—has been allowed to fall into the dustbins of literary study. D'Arcy's frustrations and eventual bitterness over publishers' reluctance to bring out her works may have motivated her to slack in her productivity. Though she published little, that little is worth far more attention than the passing glances it has customarily been given. The bibliography below is offered as one attempt to counter such neglect and to stimulate renewed attention to her work. One of the greatest obstacles to the study of Ella D'Arcy in any depth is the paucity of materials for a full-dress biography. We encounter in literary histories, for instance, divergent dates offered for the birth and death of this Anglo-Irish woman—although 1856-57 seems likely for the former and 5 September 1937 is now known as the actual date upon which she died. D'Arcy undertook training to become a painter during her younger days, but eye troubles militated against her continuing in that field, and so she turned to writing. She has been also more than once designated "novelist," although in point of fact she published just 179 ELT : VOLUME 35:2 1992 one work in that genre. Early in her career, reviewers suggested that this author might be a man masking behind a feminine pseudonym—a supposition shortly thereafter laid to rest. The accounts D'Arcy herself furnished about her life and literary career frequently tease more than they satisfy because they may well have been clouded by a faulty memory and, perhaps, intentional by her own reticence concerning her personal circumstances. Given that stories circulated about her liaisons with M. P. Shiel, Henry Harland, and John Lane (and that she herself in several letters alluded to what may have been at least one more), she may indeed have had reasons not to be forthcoming with minute biographical details. Frederick Rolfe's unflattering allusions to her in Nicholas Crabbe, if they are accurate, indicate why she may not have wholly imparted the facts of her private life. Crabbe describes the "sub-edtior of the Blue Volume [The Yellow Book]" as living nearby "Sidney Thorah" [Henry Harland]. She [D'Arcy] is an "intellectual mouse-mannered piece of sex," who "played the chorus" to dialogue between the fictionalized Harland and John Lane. Crabbe later wonders: "What was the relation between [Thorah] and the mouse-mannered sub-editor? Obviously they were not man and wife. But that drawing-room had a feminine air. . . . Was there a wife? Oh, what did it matter? Think of something else. . . ." Crabbe admits that the lady "looked clever," although, couched as it is, the admission sounds grudging. The materials she promised to bequeath to Katherine Lyon Mix never came to light, lost, possibly, in the course of D'Arcy's peripatetic wanderings from England through the Channel Islands into France and back again, finally, to London. The information recorded by others is also often subject to question, that, for example, in Netta Syrett's autobiography, Sheltering Tree, where we might detect a touch of envy from a presumably close friend. Commenting that D'Arcy's work attracted considerable attention as it appeared during the 1890s, Syrett remarks that such notice was...

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