The ‘godmother of Irish children’s literature’ – Brian Maye on Patricia Lynch

As the author of some 50 children’s books and around 200 short stories, Patricia Lynch, who died 50 years ago on September 1st, has been described as the “godmother of Irish children’s literature”. She was one of the most popular writers for children in the newly independent Irish state. But the facts of her own childhood are shrouded in mystery, to such an extent that one commentator has said that it comes across like a plot in one of her novels.

According to Robert Dunbar, who wrote the entry on Lynch in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, she was born on June 4th, 1894, in Cork city, daughter of Thomas (also known as Timothy) Lynch and Nora Lynch, who were close – probably first – cousins, and already the parents of a son, Patrick Henry. Dunbar acknowledges that details about her childhood are scarce and come mainly from her autobiographical A Storyteller’s Childhood (1947), “although the extent to which this is reliable is uncertain”.

Denise Dowdall (www.historyeye.ie) believes she was born Winifred Lynch in London on June 7th, 1882, the third child and second daughter of her parents, and that she ditched Winifred in favour of Patricia some time after serious illness caused her to quit her job with the Royal Mail in London around 1912. Dowdall thinks it likely that she saw little of her beloved Cork and the other rural Munster settings she described in her writings and that her childhood was spent mainly in London.

Her father seems to have dabbled in various jobs and appears in her autobiography as a wandering adventurer who went to Egypt, where he was joined by her mother. As a result, the five-year-old Patricia was minded by a Mrs Hennessy in Bantry, well known as a storyteller and from whom she inherited a love of Irish folktales and legends.

Mary Hannigan: Ireland are competing but they’re nowhere close thus far to pointing

---

Ken Early: Effortlessly elegant Ancelotti deservedly considered among the world’s best

---

Dublin constituency: Left-wing candidates face dog fight for the last seat

---

Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV+: 10 of the best new shows to watch in June

---

According to Lynch herself, her father died in Egypt when she was six; in reality, according to Dowdall, he died in London in 1883 when she was barely eight months old. This left her mother in a precarious position with young children and no obvious source of income. Money-related problems became a frequent theme in her subsequent fiction. The family also moved around a lot – another common theme in the fiction. Cousin Kate, who comes to the rescue in difficult situations in certain stories, was likely based on a real-life maternal cousin.

Her beloved brother, Patrick Henry, worked to support his widowed mother and his siblings. He became a socialist and trade-union activist and was friendly with James Connolly and the English activist, RM Fox, whom Patricia later married. Patrick died prematurely from pneumonia in December 1916 and is the likely inspiration for several of her fictional characters, such as the violin-playing Jimmy in The Green Dragon, and Hugh Patrick in Delia Daly of Galloping Green.

Patricia’s peripatetic existence meant she attended various schools and she worked for some years in London for the Royal Mail (as Winifred Lynch), according to Denise Dowdall, until serious illness caused her to retire around 1912. She reappeared as Patricia Lynch as an activist in the East London Federation of Suffragettes and wrote for its mouthpiece, The Women’s [later Workers’] Dreadnought. Sent by Sylvia Pankhurst to Dublin to cover the 1916 Rising, her subsequent article, “Scenes from the Rebellion”, was “one of the earliest and most graphic eye-witness accounts” of the event, according to Robert Dunbar.

In October 1922, she married the English writer, socialist and pacifist, RM Fox, who’d long been interested in Irish history and politics, and they settled in Dublin. Her first children’s stories were published in the Irish Press and her first children’s novel, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey, was first serialised there. The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey series and the Brogeen the leprechaun series were probably her most successful novels and she proved a prolific writer in a wide variety of genres that included realistic adventure stories, historical fiction, and fantasy with much reference to Irish legends and folklore. Many of her books were illustrated by famous Irish artists such as Jack B Yeats, Seán Keating and Harry Kernoff. Childhood rejection, loneliness and emigration were common themes in her more realistic fiction, according to Robert Dunbar. Her work was translated into several languages and won many national and international awards.

Following her forensic examination of the details of Lynch’s childhood, Denis Dowdall reflected on her many contradictions: the hard-nosed political radicalism of her early journalism versus the sweet, magical fictional children’s tales; the Cork accent she gives herself in autobiographical dialogue passages versus her lifelong London accent; a Londoner preoccupied with Irish rural settings while simultaneously an archetypical Irish writer whose books found a home with a non-Irish publisher.

These contradictions were explained somewhat by ex-director of the National Library of Ireland Pat Donlon who pointed out that the subject matter of Lynch’s writing became part of the official iconography of the new Irish State. That would have been a very strong reason for her to assume an imagined Irish upbringing.