Dillon, Eilís (1920–94), writer, was born 7 March 1920 in Galway city, third among five children of Thomas Dillon (qv), professor of chemistry at University College Galway (UCG), and his wife Geraldine (1891–1986), daughter of George Noble (Count) Plunkett (qv) and sister of Joseph Mary Plunkett (qv). Dillon was extremely conscious of her family's history, partly through the longevity of her parents and Plunkett grandparents; she lived with Count and Countess Plunkett for some time in the early 1930s and recalled some of their memories and Victorian social attitudes. Inside Ireland (1982) structures its account of Irishness round the Plunketts’ family history and her own memories of childhood and youth. She displays less interest in her Dillon ancestors, possibly because of greater closeness to her mother as a child, and because her mother long outlived her father. The image of the Irish nation as an extended family, rooted in the peasantry but experiencing a rising social and economic trajectory launched by the independence struggle, is central to much of Dillon's historical fiction. Both parents were active in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the war of independence. Dillon's earliest memory was of British soldiers searching the family home when her mother was taken away to prison.
Early life
Dillon was brought up first at Dangan House, three miles north of Galway city, then (after the local bank manager forced a sale under circumstances bitterly recalled in Inside Ireland and humorously recreated in her children's story Down in the world (1983)) at Barna, a fishing village which some decades later became a suburb of Galway city. Her parents’ decision to send their children to the local primary school at both locations gave her command of the Irish language and an intimate knowledge of the life and conditions of the Connemara people which deeply informs her stories. It also gave her intense night fears, acquired from folk-beliefs picked up from servants and other children.
Her parents possessed a strong social conscience, and their account of the independence movement, as transmitted to Eilís, emphasised as its motivation the view that British governmental neglect had been responsible for the inhuman conditions of Edwardian Dublin's slums and the recurrent near-famines in the West, and that a native government would be more responsive to Irish social problems. Eilís inherited this sense of haut bourgeois social obligation, mixed as it was with a certain amount of condescension. She also acquired their cultural interests (they were active in the Irish-language Taidbhearc theatre) and later recalled that there had never been a time when she did not want to write.
From 1931 Dillon received her secondary education at the Ursuline Convent, Sligo, which possessed a strong French tradition; she found in her music classes a refuge from the emotional strains of adolescence and the constraints of boarding-school life. She remembered her convent education with gratitude as generally highly cultured and lovingly maternal, though the school library was dominated by the works of Annie Smithson (qv), and some of the books which she brought from home would have been burned had they not borne the signature of Joseph Mary Plunkett; Dillon was the only member of her class whom the nuns did not ask to consider joining the Ursuline Order.
Marriage; success as a writer for children
After briefly considering a professional career as a cellist, Dillon worked in the hotel and catering business in Dublin. In 1940 she married Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, a veteran of the war of independence, eighteen years her senior, and lecturer in Irish at University College Cork (UCC), whom she met while she was running an Irish-language summer school in Co. Waterford. Ó Cuilleanáin later became professor of Irish at UCC, and the couple ran the Honan hostel, the principal student residence. Dillon was somewhat dismayed to discover that sections of the Cork catholic haute bourgeoisie had retained anglophilic attitudes into the 1940s and that her expressions of admiration for Sean O'Faolain (qv) and Frank O'Connor (qv) were met with pained inquiries about whether she was a liberal. She later took part in Cork artistic and literary circles around Seamus Murphy (qv), and expressed pride in the role of the UCC graduate Seán Ó Riada (qv) in the revival of Irish music. Dillon was an enthusiastic reader of the Bell and can be seen as an example of the aesthetically sophisticated and unpietistic national bourgeoisie whose emergence O'Faolain hoped to encourage. She shared O'Faolain's contempt for the literary censorship machine, and later recalled wondering whether she would ever receive the supreme literary accolade of having a book banned. Dillon and Ó Cuilleanáin had two daughters (including the poet Eibhlín Ní Chuilleanáin) and a son, all of whom went on to distinguished careers in scholarship and music.
From the early 1950s Dillon established a reputation as a skilled and successful writer of children's stories, when there were few significant Irish children's writers other than Patricia Lynch (qv). Her first children's story, An Choill Bheo (1948), was in Irish; it was followed by Oscar agus an Cóiste sé nEasóg (1952) and Ceol na coille (1955), but after the success of The lost island (Faber and Faber, 1952) she wrote predominantly in English. (This was her second English-language children's story after Midsummer magic (1949). Although some of her stories are aimed at small children (The little wild house (1955), The cat's opera (1962), King Big-Ears (1961)), most are written for readers in their early teens. The influence of Robert Louis Stevenson is evident, especially in the earlier stories which combine exotic treasure-hunting and sinister marauders with carefully observed description (e.g. how a donkey's hair flattens when the wind blows on it); the seductive criminal mastermind in The San Sebastian (1953) is a very Stevensonian figure, and the miserly uncle in The house by the shore (1955) is a direct imitation of Uncle Ebenezer in Stevenson's Kidnapped. Many of these are precisely located in a carefully observed Connemara (often in islands on its westernmost tip) in an unspecified period between Irish independence and the date of publication. (The seals (1968), specifically set during the war of independence, is an exception to this last point.). A strong emphasis is placed on the central characters’ discovery of their problem-solving abilities and achieving responsibility, while the adult villains are often distinguished by wilful backward-looking refusal to expose their grandiose dreams to the challenges of everyday life, or by self-centred complacency wilfully indifferent to the needs of others. Dillon received a number of book awards, including the 1970 Lewis Carroll Shelf award for A herd of deer and the 1991 Irish Children's Book of the Year award for The island of ghosts.
Rome; adult fiction
In 1964 Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin resigned from his chair and moved with Dillon to Rome for health reasons – a move facilitated by Dillon's literary earnings. She responded with enthusiasm to Italy, acting as adviser to the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. After Ó Cuilleanáin returned to Cork (1969) and died (in St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin on 26 October 1970), she continued to revisit Italy and write occasional stories set in Italy, ancient (Living in imperial Rome (1974), The shadow of Vesuvius (1978)) and modern (e.g. Under the orange grove (1968), The five hundred (1972)). These have not attracted the same following as the Irish stories. In 1974 Dillon married Vivian Mercier (qv) in an extremely happy and intellectually stimulating union; thereafter dividing her time between California (she taught creative writing at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where Mercier was a professor), Italy, and Dublin.
Dillon's adult fiction began with three detective stories, Death at Crane's Court (1953), Sent to his account (1954), and Death in the quadrangle (1956). These are less notable for their detection than for their often wry comments on contemporary Ireland; Death in the quadrangle provides a humorous portrayal of Irish academia while Sent to his account features rival versions of modernisation in its opposition of a brash, exploitative businessman (who is murdered) and an ageing Dublin accountant who inherits a run-down estate from aristocratic relatives and revitalises it through a scheme which includes offering a cooperative partnership to employees. (Several Dillon novels present similar cooperative business schemes as reconciling capital and labour.) The bitter glass (1959) depicts in faintly Chekhovian manner a group of well-to-do catholic adolescents stranded in their Connemara summerhouse by the outbreak of the civil war. The head of the family (1960), centred on the family of an elderly writer (a sanitised version of James Joyce (qv)), is an early attempt at the family saga; the writer's self-centredness, though necessary for his achievement, produces disastrous consequences for his family and ultimately for the man himself. In Inside Ireland Dillon calls Ulysses ‘the father and mother of all Irish novels’ (156).
Bold John Henebry (1965) may be seen as an origin-legend for the self-consciously sophisticated catholic middle-classes of the 1960s; its hero is dismissed as a stationmaster for speaking out of turn to a local landlord, becomes a successful Dublin businessman, takes part in the war of independence, and becomes a Fianna Fáil TD and patron of the arts. The best-selling Across the bitter sea (1973) depicts the growth of the nationalist movement from the post-famine era to the Easter rising through the experiences of an extended family centred on Alice McDonagh and her two husbands, the catholic landlord Samuel Flaherty and the revolutionary Morgan Connolly, both of whom she loves (though she sleeps with Morgan while Samuel is alive). Its sequel Blood relations (1978) gives an account of the post-1916 independence struggle extending to the 1921 truce, again mediated through the experiences of a young woman drawn into the struggle and caught between two lovers, a grandson of Samuel and Alice and a middle-aged businessman-rebel. (The heroine's portrayal as the nondescript, sexually indiscreet, and opportunistic fiancée of an Easter 1916 martyr, and her shabby-genteel protestant background, appear to be based on Geraldine Plunkett Dillon's hostile characterisation of Grace Gifford (qv)). Both books contain beautifully textured descriptions of Galway and Connemara life but suffer from many drawbacks of the historical-novel genre; historical figures are wheeled on and off within a few paragraphs, never to be seen again, and the central characters move from one historical event to another like beads on a string. The novels’ central interest lies in their implicit or explicit comments on 1970s Ireland; a second-hand description of the presbyterian preacher Hugh Hanna (qv) in Across the bitter sea clearly recalls Ian Paisley (qv), and when one character disregards episcopal prohibitions on the queens’ colleges because bishops are notoriously lacking in judgement, this can be seen as a comment on John Charles McQuaid (qv) and his just-expired Trinity ban. The decisive dismissal in Blood relations of the ‘two nations’ theory (favoured by Vivian Mercier's friend Conor Cruise O'Brien) had obvious contemporary resonances, as had the (implicitly post-Vatican II) emphasis on divine love placed in the mouth of the real-life political martyr Fr Michael Griffin (qv), and the decision of Aunt Jack in Blood relations to acknowledge openly her illegitimate daughter because she expects ‘a new era of truthfulness’.
Two later novels set in the eighteenth century are considerably better-structured and less afraid to give their central characters a dark side. The wild geese (1981) is a family saga of the experiences of Franco-Irish Galway gentry under the penal laws, amid the corruptions of ancien régime France, and in revolutionary America. Its semi-sequel, Citizen Burke (1984), based on a real-life Irish priest in Bordeaux who abandoned the priesthood for farming at the time of the French revolution, preserved the students of the local Irish College from execution, and helped to avert a regional famine, was Dillon's favourite novel; critics have generally agreed with her preference for this account of a man who, though often bewildered, despised by former associates, and no more than a footnote in history, retains a basic integrity. The interloper (1987) is a grim and opaque psychological portrait of an intransigent civil-war-era republican.
Final years
In the 1970s and 1980s Dillon played a prominent role in the cultural life of Dublin, well known for her encouragement of younger writers; she was a Fellow of the Royal Society for Literature and a member of Aosdána, served on the Irish Arts Council 1974–9, chaired the Irish Writers’ Union and the Irish Writers’ Centre, and founded the Irish Children's Book Trust. In 1987 she and Vivian Mercier moved permanently to Dublin. His death (November 1989) was a severe blow, followed a few months later by the death of her daughter Máire, a violinist. Dillon edited Mercier's incomplete masterwork Modern Irish literature: sources and founders for posthumous publication and dedicated to Máire her last children's story, Children of Bach (1993); its theme of Hungarian Jewish children escaping the Holocaust was partly influenced by her role in establishing a Hungarian–Irish writers’ exchange scheme; its last words are ‘The world will always need music’). In 1991 Eilis Dillon received a Doctor of Letters honoris causa from the National University of Ireland. She died 19 July 1994 in Dublin and is buried in Clara, Co. Offaly, with Vivian Mercier.
More information on this entry is available at the National Database of Irish-language biographies (Ainm.ie).