Biography: Of the various writers whose work constitutes the complex phenomenon known as Irish children's literature, few inspire the degree of affectionate nostalgia that comes with the name of Patricia Lynch.
Her 50 or so children's books, published over some 40 years, starting with The Green Dragon (1925) and ending with The Kerry Caravan (1967), became significant parts of the childhoods of several generations of young Irish readers, to be lovingly recalled long afterwards through adult eyes.
Though it is easy, from a more objective critical viewpoint, to see her limitations as a writer - repetitive plotting, characterisation that at times becomes mere stereotyping and an over-reliance on exaggerated supernatural effects - there is no denying the key role she had in the formation of many readers.
Lynch's autobiographical A Storyteller's Childhood, first published in 1947, serves as the basis for much of Young's account of the writer's early years. "A great deal of it," wrote the Times Literary Supplement in a contemporary review, "can scarcely be genuine recollection but must be largely built up of single remembered pictures strung together by imagination and by information acquired later in life."
While Young quotes these comments, she could perhaps be slightly more questioning of some of the details of a book that Maeve Friel (in an article in Children's Books in Ireland, autumn 1998, not included in Young's bibliography) has described as "an autobiography which re-edits the past, displays a ruthless disregard for facts and glosses over unpleasant truths."
But whatever the precise balance between truth and fiction in the "autobiography", it is beyond doubt, as Young points out, that "the mixture of love and neglect, of insecurity and anxiety" that characterised Lynch's nomadic childhood should come to be reflected in much of her work.
In a particularly telling phrase in her concluding chapter Young remarks on the "sense of yearning for the unobtainable . . . that intense longing for something beyond the horizon which became an integral part of Patricia's character", and by extension, one might add, of her children's novels.
There is an interesting connection to be further explored between Lynch and the work of many of those who had been involved in the Irish Literary Revival: books such as The Grey Goose of Kilnevin and Jinny the Changeling are characterised by a Yeatsian sense of longing to recapture a lost childhood - the cry of the heart, as Yeats put it, against necessity.
There are further interesting connections to be made with Lynch's political affiliations. "She always declared herself a nationalist," writes Young, "and her proudest moments were those spent in the company of, or providing support for, the brave women in the aftermath of 1916."
Lynch's marriage to the writer and journalist RM Fox, the bohemian home they subsequently set up in Glasnevin, Dublin, and their later friendship with the Lambert family (of puppetry fame), provide Young with some of her most fascinating material, to the extent that Fox seems worthy of a biography in his own right.
Equally fascinating are her discussions of the various illustrators - many of them distinguished - who collaborated with Lynch, of Lynch's dealings with her various publishers and of her fondness for food and travel. But the real achievement of this most welcome (and beautifully produced) study lies in the totally correct focus throughout on story and on the lasting influence on her work of traditional oral storytelling, which Lynch had been exposed to as a child in her native Cork.
Robert Dunbar edited Secret Lands: The World of Patricia Lynch, which was published by The O'Brien Press in 1998
Patricia Lynch, Storyteller By Phil Young Liberties Press, 200pp. €19.95