MacCarthy, Ethna Mary (1903–59), poet and paediatrician, was born 2 April 1903 in Coleraine, Co. Londonderry, a granddaughter of the Young Ireland poet Denis Florence MacCarthy (qv), and daughter of Brendan MacCarthy (d. 1934), doctor, and Eleanor McCarthy (née Dexter). She had a sister and two brothers, Denis Florence and Desmond. At the time of her birth her father, a medical inspector in the Local Government Board, was stationed in Ulster. In 1901 he had exemplified the best traditions of his profession by going to the assistance of Dr William Smyth, medical officer to the dispensaries of Dungloe and Burtonport, Co. Donegal, when nobody in his neighbourhood would help him to transport typhus patients by boat from the fever-stricken island of Arranmore to Glenties hospital on the mainland. The doctors succeeded in their task; the five patients recovered, but Smyth contracted typhus and died.
The MacCarthys moved to Dublin in the first decade of the century when Dr MacCarthy was appointed to a post in the Custom House, where the Local Government Board had its headquarters. They lived at ‘Desmond’, Sandymount Ave., Ballsbridge, and Ethna probably attended a local convent school – her aunt, Sr Mary Stanislaus MacCarthy (qv), was a member of the community of Dominican Convent, Blackrock, and a poet. Ethna attended a secretarial college and the Royal Academy of Music before entering TCD in 1922. She studied French and Spanish (BA, 1926; MA, 1937), becoming in due course a lecturer in French and Provençal. Her academic success was paralleled by social popularity, her physical attractiveness enhanced by outstanding charm and independence. A contemporary remembered how Ethna's ‘beauty and wit threw a vivid light over the front square of Trinity College and over the lectures which were the only function at which, until quite recently, the male and female undergraduates were permitted to forgather. Her presence illumined those occasions' (‘Quidnunc’, Ir. Times 31 May 1959). Not that she would have heeded the petty regulations designed to segregate the sexes. Described as ‘a feminist avant la date’ (Knowlson, Life of Samuel Beckett), she was flirtatious, smoked in public, favoured red, low-cut dresses, and went unchaperoned to pubs and parties. Predictably she had many male admirers, including the future playwrights Denis Johnston (qv) and Samuel Beckett (qv). She is featured as ‘the Alba’ in the latter's Dream of fair to middling women and was the inspiration for the girl in the punt in ‘Krapp's last tape’. She entered a long-term relationship with A. J. (‘Con’) Leventhal (qv); they married (1956) after the death of his wife.
Meanwhile, in the mid-1930s Ethna MacCarthy joined the school of physic at TCD, graduating MB B.Ch. (1941), and proceeding MD (1946). She developed an interest in paediatrics and was physician to the children's dispensary at the Royal City of Dublin Hospital, but resigned in 1954. It had been her intention to join the World Health Organisation, but she failed the obligatory physical examination. Her few contributions to the Irish Journal of Medical Science dealt with public health problems, louse infestation, and threadworms.
A poet in her own right, she had many original verses – ‘The invitation’; ‘Clinic’; ‘Lullaby’, and others – published by the Dublin Magazine in the 1940s; the same journal and Kottabistae carried her numerous translations from Spanish and German. ‘The uninvited’, her one-act play, appeared in the Dublin Magazine (1951). ‘Flight’, a short story, was published by Ireland To-day (1937). She was reckoned to be ‘a good minor poet’ and was represented in several anthologies, including Devin-Adair's New Irish poets (1948).
Shortly before Ethna MacCarthy's death on 24 May 1959 at the East Ham Memorial Hospital, London, from cancer of the throat, Samuel Beckett, with whom she had had a lifetime's friendship, and who had corresponded with her regularly during the last sad year of her life, sent her violets picked near his home at Ussy, saying: ‘This is just my heart to you and my hand in yours and a few wood violets I'd take from their haunt for no one else’.
The Denis Johnston papers (TCD) hold a number of her letters; Beckett's letters to her are in the University of Texas at Austin; a drawing of her by Seán O'Sullivan (qv) is in the possession of Professor Eoin O'Brien. The ‘William Smyth commemorative window’, unveiled 26 November 1902, is now housed at QUB's Whitla Building, Lisburn Rd, Belfast, in the Ulster Medical Society's council room.