The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman was published by Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence in 1977, and it marked Donleavy’s return to form after several less successful novels. Darcy Dancer is a young Anglo-Irish gentleman — heir to the rambling estate of Andromeda Park — whose life is a continuous struggle to maintain the appearance of gentility while everything around him collapses.
The servants steal, the roof leaks, the creditors circle, and Darcy’s romantic entanglements (with women of every class, from parlor maids to aristocrats) invariably end in disaster. But Darcy himself — charming, randy, resilient, and possessed of an unshakable sense of his own dignity — survives every catastrophe with his self-image intact. He is a comic hero in the fullest sense: a man whose belief in himself is so absolute that reality cannot dent it.
The novel’s setting — the declining world of the Anglo-Irish gentry — gives Donleavy a rich seam of comedy: the absurdity of maintaining eighteenth-century social forms in twentieth-century Ireland, the gap between aristocratic pretension and actual poverty, the impossibility of commanding respect from servants who know their masters cannot pay them. Darcy Dancer proved popular enough to generate two sequels — Leila (1983) and That Darcy, That Dancer, That Gentleman (1990) — but the first volume remains the most energetic and inventive.
Collecting The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman
First edition (Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, 1977): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $20–$50
- Without jacket: $5–$15
- First UK edition (Allen Lane): $15–$40