Mary lavin lavin mary vol 4 essay

Mary Lavin often compared writing a short story, her chosen form for five decades, to examining a slide under a microscope. She was careful to distinguish the microscopic from “the miniature”, the doll’s-house world of containable nostalgia. “A microscope magnifies,” she elaborated in a 1979 interview.

In a letter quoted in Theresa Wray’s essay, Lavin writes that, “in Ireland, there is a constant effort to resist the advances of beauty in any form, whether it is a new pattern on a tea-cup . . . or a minute difference of shading in a coat of yellow paint . . .

From her first book, writes Anne Fogarty, Lavin “announces herself as an Irish feminist intermodernist whose multifaceted work is distinctive, exacting and driven by an unrelenting ferocity”.

“Miss Holland,” Lavin’s first short story, published in Dublin Magazine and reprinted in Tales from Bective Bridge, is the story of a typical spinster. Agnes Holland, lonely and ill prepared to face life, traveled for years with her father, who made all the decisions. At his death, Agnes must adjust to the world without anyone to help her.