Life
1900-?; b. Ennistymon, Co. Clare; dg. of Martin Francis McHugh; ed. Loreto Convent, Bray, Co. Wicklow; issued Poems (1919); ed. Freeman’s Journal 1920-24; issued a memoir of life in the Eest of Ireland, Thalassa (1931); also The Bud of Spring (1932), treating the development of a boy’s mind, raised in an orphanage. ‘Restraint, knowledge, and intimacy’ [Clark]. DIL
Works
Poems (Dublin: Martin Lester [1919]) ; Thalassa: A Story of Childhood by the Western Wave (London: Macmillan 1931), Do. (Dublin: Parkside 1945); The Bud of Spring (London: Macmillan 1932).
Reference
Stephen J. Brown & Desmond Clarke, Ireland in Fiction [Pt. II] (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1985): The Bud of Spring (1932) treats of the development of a boy’s mind, being raised in an orphanage. with ‘restraint, knowledge, and intimacy’ [Clarke].
Robert Hogan, ed., Dictionary of Irish Literature (Gill & Macmillan 1979), comments upon McHugh's ‘stiff, English-composition-prizewinning prose’ calling it ‘stiff, literary and conventional, but occasionally capable of authentic social life’, but regards Thalassa (1931) a valuable social record of life in the west of Ireland at the beginning of the century [Mary Rose Callaghan].
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