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Alison Healy on how a 19-year old woman tricked the world with a literary hoax
The news desk of the New York Times had a bountiful harvest of stories to choose from on June 4th, 1926.
Its front page features a story about the Crown Prince Gustav and Crown Princess Louise of Sweden stopping by the laboratory of Thomas Edison in New Jersey. He told the prince he had come up with a record that could play for 40 minutes and to prove it, he played I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen to the impressed royals. He also whipped a strip of film from his pocket and handed it to the prince, telling him it was a motion picture.
Also on the front page is a story about a theatrical producer sentenced to prison over a case involving a bathtub on a stage that contained alcohol – this was the era of Prohibition of course. And in something that could have come straight out of an Agatha Christie novel, there's a report about a suspected gem thief who was arrested outside the Ritz and found to have had $30,000 worth of jewels in a secret compartment of her handbag.
But most interesting of all for Irish readers is the headline 'Girl Tricks World with Literary Hoax intended as Joke'. A sub-heading explains that 'Magdalen King-Hall of Erin's Wild North Coast Wrote of Paris and Venice of Long Ago'.
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The newspaper scoop explains how 'a little Irish girl, the 19-year-old daughter of a British naval officer, has accomplished the greatest literary hoax of the century'.
Magdalen King-Hall, who was living in Portaferry, Co Down at the time, was the secret hand behind a best-selling sensation. The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion in the Year 1764-1765 was published in 1925 and was purported to be the discovered diary of Cleone Knox from Castle Kearney, Co Down.
It reads like the mid-18th century version of Bridget Jones' Diary, with a mild hint of Sex in the City and a sprinkle of Jane Austen thrown in for good measure. Conveniently, the foreword explains there is no portrait or miniature of Cleone Knox because of a fire at Castle Kearney in 1808.
The diary opens with her beau, the handsome rogue David Ancaster, falling from the ivy as he attempts to gain entry to her bedroom late one night. Papa finds him prostrate on the ground and there is hell to pay. She's not too bothered though as she adds that she 'Tried on my new striped silk gown which becomes me excessively well.'
To avoid any more amorous indiscretions, Papa takes Cleone and her brother Ned away on a grand European tour. She finds herself in a series of humorous predicaments, administering a sound box on the ears to a drunken suitor, and falling off the chair with tiredness when a hostess insists on reading from Milton's Paradise Lost for three hours.
Like an olde world Forrest Gump, she meets everyone who matters. In France, she's presented to the king and queen at Versailles. She finds the queen to be dowdy and the royal daughters plain and clumsy while King Louis XV is handsome but dissolute. In Switzerland, Voltaire receives her family in a chintz dressing-gown and reminds her of a 'chattering old magpie'.
Her brother runs off with a nun in Venice which makes her wonder if there are not enough loose women in Venice 'without him ravishing a cloistered nun'.
The diary ends abruptly with the surprise appearance of David Ancaster in Venice. We are informed that they eloped, married and lived happily ever after in Co Down with their brood of 12 children.
Recalling the hoax diary on the King-Hall family website, Magdalen King-Hall's late son Richard Perceval Maxwell wrote that The Sunday Times
had published a long and enthusiastic review of the book and lauded it as a great find, similar to the Pepys diaries. 'One reader, Winston Churchill…excused his late arrival at a dinner party by saying he had had to finish the Diary before coming,' he wrote.
Six months after the bestseller was published, Magdalen King-Hall admitted her deception, thus further boosting sales. She was bored and had written it to pass the time. She also pointed to an error that could have blown her cover – her diarist was reading Walpole's Castle of Otrantoe a few months before the book was published.
Happily for readers, Magdalen King-Hall put her lively imagination to great effect in later life, becoming a journalist and successful author.
The mid-1920s were no barrel of laughs, with Hitler publishing Mein Kampf and Mussolini becoming a dictator, but, for a short and glorious time, Magdalen King-Hall added greatly to the gaiety of the nation.
