Description

Undated Circa 1940: First Edition / Hardcover / Very Good Condition

Original tan cloth with black titles on the spine and original pictorial dust jacket. 317 very clean and bright pages, mild speckled top edge, first free page missing. Boards slightly faded with time. The dust jacket is shabby and rubbed with time and chipped and ripped along the edges supported by clear tape but remains intact. A very scarce edition.
(GT576)

Postage €6.00 including any additional books ordered.
An Post prepaid postage envelopes within the Republic of Ireland, with no weight restrictions from €6.00.

House of Cards, originally published in 1940, delves into the explicable workings of the human heart. At the age of seventeen, Anne Farrelly leaves her hometown in the West of Ireland for England, eager for the adventure of education and the promise of a career to follow. In the decade that follows, Anne works up from a lowly position at a struggling English school to a directorship at an Italian firm’s Rome offices, all the while contending with the question of whether she must be married in order to find true fulfilment. Through every turn—romantic, tragic, or comedic—Curtayne presents the concrete difficulties, fraught decisions, and testing freedoms in the life of a young woman. Curtayne’s first foray into the realm of fiction, House of Cards is a debut novel worthy of serious consideration for its compelling dramatic arc as much as for its distinctive and credible an ambitious young woman who may stand to lose more than she gains by her choices.

She was an Irish author and lecturer. She was born on 6 November 1898, 2 Upper Castle St, Tralee, Co. Kerry. She was a daughter of John Curtayne, carriage builder, or coach builder, of Castle St, Tralee, by his wife Bridget Mary O'Dwyer.

She was educated at St. Anne's, Southampton. Married Stephen Rynne with two sons and two daughters.

Her first book was St Catherine of Siena (1929). After Catherine of Siena she wrote several works of nationalist history including a life of Patrick Sarsfield (1934). The novel House of Cards (1940) concerns an Irish girl who marries an Italian industrialist.

Alice lectured extensively in the US including at least three trans-American tours.

She gave the Medora A. Feehan Lectures in Irish History and Literature at Anna Maria College, Paxton, Massachusetts, USA in the Spring semester of 1959. The College awarded her an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters and she was presented with the Key to Worcester City by Mayor James D. O'Brien.

In December 1954 The Irish Press sent her to Rome to write daily reports on the close of The Marian Year. She went to Rome again for the final session of the Second Vatican Council. She was commissioned to send weekly reports to the local newspapers The Carlow Nationalist and The Kerryman. She also sent a series of profiles of outstanding personages of this Vatican Council to The Universe and an article for Hibernia journal.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57252092-house-of-cards