Tales (1989) and Carolyn Swift’s Irish Myths and Tales for Young People (1990). Scott
has also written several fantasy novels which reflect his interest in Irish mythology.
Folk-tales also provided inspiration for the blind Donegal author, Frances Browne
whose Granny’s Wonderful Chair appeared in 1857, for Padraic Colum with The King of
Ireland’s Son (1916) and for several collections by Sinead de Valera. Fantasy worlds also
inspired Oscar Wilde to write The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888).
In a different vein, two prolific writers of the later nineteenth century whose novels
were widely read outside Ireland, were Thomas Mayne Reid, the author of rollicking
adventure stories, and L.T.Meade, writer of school stories for girls.
Patricia Lynch wrote over fifty books, many of them, such as The Turf-Cutter’s Donkey
(1934), set in a rural Ireland which at times becomes a land of magic. Rural life was a
popular background for writers in the mid-twentieth century, such as Maura Laverty
with The Cottage in the Bog (1945), and the western landscape is evoked by Walter
Macken in The Island of the Great Yellow Ox (1966) and The Flight of the Doves (1967). Her
native west of Ireland is used by Eilis Dillon as the background for many of her novels,
such as The Lost Island (1952) and The Coriander (1963), and more recently, The Island
of Ghosts which won the 1990 Bisto Book of the Year Award. However, in The Children
of Bach (1993) she has written with considerable sensitivity about children faced with
personal and political conflict in central Europe. Janet McNeill who was born in Dublin,
has also produced a considerable number of titles, among them those featuring her
eponymous hero, Specs McCann.
Belfast-born C.S.Lewis set his children’s novels in the fantasy Land of Narnia, but
Ulster itself is the setting for most of the historical novels of Meta Mayne Reid. Irish
history is also the focus for most of the novels of Michael Mullen, although it may be
argued that his best works are the magical Magus the Lollipop Man (1981) and The
Caravan (1990) which has a contemporary background of social and economic
deprivation. In 1991 Marita Conlon-McKenna won the International Reading Association
Award for Under the Hawthorn Tree (1990), which describes some of the misery of the
nineteenth-century potato famine. A detailed historical background characterises the
historical novels of Morgan Llywelyn and a strong sense of the past is also evoked in
John Quinn’s The Gold Cross of Kiladoo (1992), but he displays a more sensitive
interpretation of events gone by in The Summer of Lily and Esme (winner of the 1991
Bisto Book of the Year Award).
Martin Waddell is the author of over ninety books, ranging from picture books for the
very young to works for older readers, which he writes under the name of Catherine
Sefton. In a number of these, such as Starry Night (1986), his characters resolve
tensions in their own lives against the background of conflict in Northern Ireland. The
northern troubles are also the background for Belfast born Joan Lingard’s Kevin and
Sadie novels, but while it is also set in Ulster, this conflict is just hinted at in Sam
McBratney’s Put a Saddle on a Pig (1992), in which he moves from books like the Jimmy
Zest series for younger readers, to writing for a teenage audience.
The central characters in the Giltspur trilogy by Cormac MacRaois move between the
present and pre-historical times as good and evil battle for supremacy in the County
Wicklow landscape. Moral battles with an environmental theme are the focus for Tom
McCaughren’s Fox series, the first of which, Run With the Wind (1983), won a Bisto Book
688 THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE