Honor Tracy

Honor Tracy (19 October 1913 – 13 June 1989) was a British writer of novels and travel literature.

Life and career Tracy was born Honor Lilbush Wingfield Tracy in 1913 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, one of four children of a surgeon, Humphrey Wingfield Tracy, and an artist, Chrystabel Miner. After an education at the Grove School , London, and overseas in Dresden and Paris, she worked first as an assistant in a London publishing house and then for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's London office.

Tracy then became a newspaper correspondent in Dublin. During this period, she was the subject of a lawsuit by Maurice O'Connell, parish priest of Doneraile, Cork, who claimed he had been libelled by a pointed article Tracy had written in the Sunday Times about the new parochial house which he was building. The newspaper settled with O'Connell. Tracy then sued the newspaper and was awarded £3000 in damages.

Tracy is best known as a travel writer. Her best-known travel book is Winter in Castille (1973). Her novels satirise British-Irish relations and Ireland itself with wit and occasionally bitterness. Her best-known novels are The Straight and Narrow Path (1956), The Quiet End of Evening (1972), and The Ballad of Castle Reef (1979). Harold Watts stated that "her novels are designed to be read with a glass of sherry in the hand, preferably in the company of persons as basically sensible as the ideal reader of Miss Tracy's work."

A convert to Catholicism, she lived for many years in Achill Island, County Mayo, Ireland but died in 1989 in a nursing home in Oxford, England.