Life
1913-1987 [Honor Lilbush Wingfield Tracy]; b. Suffolk; journalist, attached
to wartime British Ministry of Information, as Japanese specialist; Observer
columnist; Irish books incl. Mind You, I’ve Said Nothing (1953),
with sketches of Behan, Smyllie, et al., comically scathing both the Irish
and Anglo-Irish, and characterised as ‘brilliant and unjust book’
by Louis MacNeice; The Straight and Narrow Path (1956), a rowdy
Irish farce; won considerable damages from an English Sunday broadsheet
for impugning her journalistic integrity in conceding a libel case passed
on her true reportage; settled in Achill Island, Co. Mayo. DIL ATT
OCIL
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Works
[Selected,] Kakemono (London: Methuen 1950) [sketches of life in Japan];
novels, The Deserters (1954); The Straight and Narrow
Path (London: Methuen; NY: Random Hse 1958); A Number of Things
(London: Methuen; NY, Random Hse 1960); A Season of Mists (London:
Methuen; NY: Random Hse 1961); The First Day of Friday (London:
Methuen; NY: Random Hse 1963); Men at Work (London: Methuen; NY:
Random Hse 1967); The Beauty of the World (London: Methuen; NY:
Random Hse 1967); Settled in Chambers (London: Methuen; NY: Random
Hse 1968); Butterflies of the Province Butterflies of the Province
NY: Random Hse; London: Eyre Methuen 1970); The Quiet End of Evening
(NY: Random Hse; London: Eyre Methuen 1970).
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Notes
Belfast Central Public Library (1956 Cat.) lists The Beauty of the World
(1967); Butterflies of the Province (1970); First Day of Friday (1963);
In the Year of Grace (1975); The Man from Next Door (1973); Men at Work
(1966); A Number of Things (1960), and others.
Kilkenny rules: Tracy is treated disparagingly in Hubert
Butler’s account of the Canon of Doneraile’s suit against the Observer (see Escape from the Anthill). See also commentary
on Hubert Butler’s review of her 1953 book in Edna Longley, ‘Defending
Ireland’s Soul: Protestant Writers and Irish nationalism after Independence’, The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland (Newcastle-Upon-Tyne:
Bloodaxe 1994, p.143.)
Brian Inglis, in Downstart (London: Chatto & Windus 1990), cites en passant the case of Honor Tracy who won ‘swingeing damages’ from the Sunday Times [sic] for impugning her journalistic honesty (p.223.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)