That meant that a degree of suspense was lost - I knew from the start that something had happened and I knew, from the tone, that the Fitzgerald's had been able to put whatever had happened behind them. Overall, folks, I think "The Uninvited" is not a perfect book, but it is a bonafide classic, full of chilling atmosphere, moans in the night, and sighs at the foot of the bed. It surprises me that the book had been out of print for so long. Fortunately, Tramp Press reissued the novel in 2015 as part of the Recovered Voices series to shine a spotlight on less known women authors. Macardle wrote a follow-up called "The Unforseen" which also was released in the Recovered Voices series. I think her work and life is worth investigating, as she was quite the badass during and after the Irish Civil War, and her writing is accessible yet beautiful.

During a housewarming party, a friend of Roddy and Pamela’s is profoundly disturbed by something she sees in the mirror of the spare bedroom. Roddy spends the next night in that spare bedroom, and finds himself overcome by fear and foreboding. And then, when Roddy and Pamela away from the house, Lizzie is terrified by something that she sees emerging from that room, something that she can not find the words to explain. While working as a journalist with the League of Nations in the 1930s she acquired a considerable affinity with the plight of pre-war Czechoslovakia. Consequently she differed with official Irish government policy on the threat of Nazism, Irish neutrality during World War II, compulsory Irish language teaching in schools, and deplored what she saw as the reduced status of women in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland.

Customer reviews

Such a classic of the supernatural. I first read this book when it was referenced by a character in another ghost story I enjoyed. One of those winding paths that leads you unexpectedly to a new favorite on your bookshelf. I liked Roddy and Pamela; I found it easy to understand who they were, where they were in life. The sibling relationship was particularly well drawn; they were a team.

Again, this is pretty much how things go for Roddy and Pamela at first, only Dorothy Macardle sets the stage for this ghost story much less efficiently than I just did. This is where some readers might lose patience, as things do get off to a very slow start.

When the republican movement split in 1921-22 over the Anglo-Irish Treaty, MacArdle sided with Éamon de Valera and the anti-Treaty Irregulars. She was imprisoned by the fledgling Free State government in 1922, during the Civil War, and served time in both Mountjoy and Kilmainham Gaols. I had an idea of how the mystery would pay out at an early stage, but that didn't spoil the story. It was an utterly believable human tragedy, and I could understood how and why it had happened. And I was caught up with Roddy and Pamela as they struggled to work out what had happened and what they could, what they should, do. In between the house talk and the ghost talk there were allusions to their Irish home and it was clear that their roots and their history were important to them.

They find the owner, an elderly man with a granddaughter just out of boarding school. He seems reluctant to sell the house, and reluctant to explain why, but Roddy is persuasive. A romance grows between Roddy and Stella and that complicates the story; because the house had been Stella's childhood home, because the haunting of the house had its roots in a tragedy that happened then, and because whenever the Fitzgerald's saw the possibility of a resolution they also saw the possibility of harm to Stella.A brother and sister, in an attempt to escape their pasts and the chaos of the city, buy a house in remote Devonshire. It turns out, however, that the house is already occupied by something beyond the human... Thirdly, this episode changed my approach to books like "The Uninvited." Yes, I still like my scary stories as much as any horror fan, and I'm not necessarily any more convinced in the reality of supernatural entities. I'd like to think I'm a rational person, and certainly I can understand how a number of explainable elements came together perfectly for us to experience our own genuine haunting. "The Uninvited" does not quite delve into those areas, preferring to embrace the idea of an afterlife as a foregone conclusion. But I've come to respect the idea of some form of our consciousness or emotion being tied to a place, reliving past traumas. So I tend to enjoy fiction that treats the theme with sensitivity. This novel certainly does that. The essential mystery of the reason for the haunting is easily solved but the ending still does not disappoint. Horror, sci-fi, whatever you want to call it, but the main point to know about The Uninvited is that it's all supposedly true. In the 1970s, Broadhaven in Wales became a place for several UFO sightings. In addition to schoolchildren seeing an alien dressed in a silver suit, the Coombs family encountered several unexplained phenomena (teleporting cows, constantly breaking cars and televisions, strange lights etc.). Well, unexplained until years after the publication of The Uninvited several people came forward and claimed some of it was just a hoax. You don't say?

Macardle was a member of the Gaelic League and later joined Cumann na mBan in 1917. In 1918 (during the War of Independence), Macardle was arrested by the RIC while teaching at Alexandra; she was eventually dismissed in 1923, towards the latter end of the Irish Civil War, because of her anti-Treatyite sympathies and activities. There are several points to my story. First of all, it allowed me to give you a taste of what you can expect from "The Uninvited" without spoiling any plot. If you liked hearing about my own ghost, then this book is definitely for you. It is the template for grounded, slow-burn haunted house stories. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that inspired me to stay up later than intended to read just one more chapter; certainly one of my favorite reading discoveries this year. Macardle recounted her Civil War experiences in Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). Macardle became a playwright in the next two decades. In her dramatic writing she used the pseudonym Margaret Callan. During this time she worked as a journalist at the League of Nations. It was obvious there was going to be a ghost story. Roddy was telling the story and the substance of the book was a manuscript, introduced by a letter explaining that it was an account of what had happened in Devon.Steff was pregnant with our daughter, but we didn't have any kids in the house. Needless to say, this freaked us both out, and we did some research on the house. The original tenant was a single mother and a kept woman of a wealthy pioneer explorer. Her daughter died in the house at 11-years-old of tuberculosis. We told our story to the lady who sold us the place, who admitted that she and her guests had also seen the little girl when living in that house, assuring us that she was sweet and harmless. They know that something happened in that house. They suspect that it involves Stella, the granddaughter of the man who reluctantly sold them the house, because she is drawn to them and to that room.