House of Cards

By Alice Curtayne House of Cards 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 fulfillment. Through every turn—romantic, tragic, or comedic—Curtayne presents the concrete difficulties, fraught decisions, and testing freedoms in the life of a young woman. She felt like a child who had built up a house of cards and was afraid to see it fall. She could not afford to see it fall, for that pitiful house of cards was all her life. Alice Curtayne (1898–1981) was an Irish author, critic, journalist, and lecturer. In 1935, she married fellow author Stephen Rynne, with whom she raised four children and tended their family farm. Curta