LYNCH, Patricia. Asal Fhear na Mónadh . Maighréad Nic Mhaicín a rinne an leagan Gaedhilge. Jack B. Yeats a rinne na pioctú irí. FIRST EDITION IN IRISH – ILLUSTRATED BY JACK B. YEATS

Átha Cliath: Oifig an tSoláthair, 1944. Octavo. An chéad chló. pp. viii, 9-331. Beige papered boards, title in blue on upper cover and spine. A very good copy. Extremely rare.
Jisc Library Hub locates 5 copies only. Not in NLI. Asal Fhear na Móna, 1944, is the Irish language version of Patricia Lynch‟s The Turf-cutter’s Donkey, illustrated by Jack B. Yeats. This is the first and best known of her 50 novels for children. When she left school in London she became a journalist and in 1916 was sent to Dublin by Sylvia Pankhurst to report on the Easter Rising. She made friends with several revolutionaries including Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz. She was a proud suffragette. In October 1922, she married the writer and socialist, R.M. Fox, and they lived in Dublin. Her first stories were published in The Irish Press and her first novel, The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey, was serialised there. She wrote prolifically in a wide variety of genres. On the death of her husband, she went to live with the Lambert family, of the Lambert Puppet Theatre fame. She was Ireland‟s Enid Blyton yet she is scarcely heard of nowadays. This work is translated by Maighréad Nic Mhaicín who was born in Dungloe, Donegal in 1899. She won a scholarship to Queen‟s University where she studied Celtic languages and French, and went on to win a scholarship to the Sorbonne. In Paris she developed an interest in Russian. She returned to Dublin in the early 1920s, living in an apartment on Grafton Street. In 1932, she travelled to Russia where she met and married Padraic Breslin who was a USSR citizen. When expecting her first child in 1938, Nic Mhaicín returned to Ireland for the birth. The Soviet government would not permit her to return to the USSR, or give Breslin a visa to leave, so she never saw her husband again. He died during World War II in the Volgolag Gulag camp in 1942. In Dublin, she began working as TCD‟s first Russian teacher. Despite her knowledge of the language, she never got promoted as she had no formal qualification in Russian. She translated a number of books from Russian, English and French into Irish. She campaigned against the standardisation of the Irish language, believing that it neglected the Donegal dialect. She died in 1983 in Dublin. In 1985, 200 Irish language books were donated to the University of Moscow by Cumann na bhFoilsitheoirí in her memory.

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