All of a sudden books are raining down on Cork: Patricia Lynch, Storyteller (Liberties, €19.95) by Phil Young was launched at the City Library last month, its publication supported by the library service in memory of former children's librarian, Pat Egan.

Patricia Lynch herself is an important entry in The Dictionary of Munster Women Writers 1800-2000, edited by UCC's Tina O'Toole for Cork University Press and launched two weeks ago. This is a terrific compendium of generous scope, including as it does two centuries of minor and major novelists, poets, academics and commentators. That kind of scope allows some detail: under "L", for example, Lynch is accompanied by Cynthia Longfield's dragonfly studies and Ada K Longfield's history of Irish lace, but also by the somewhat more scandalous career of Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton (1802-1882). The daughter of Irish feminist Anna Doyle Wheeler, whose own violently unhappy marriage should have been a warning, Rosina insisted on marrying Edward Bulwer, later Lord Lytton, and spent much of her later life (including three weeks of illegal incarceration in a mental asylum) writing about the abuses she suffered at the hands of her husband and his cronies. In the meantime she produced a dozen novels and two children; her son Edward was to eventually denounce both her and women's rights, although his daughter Constance Lytton became a prominent feminist and political activist.