SOURCE: Koenig, Marianne. “Mary Lavin: The Novels and the Stories.” Irish University Review 9, no. 2 (autumn 1979): 244-61.

In the following essay, Koenig compares Lavin's novels The House in Clewe Street and Mary O'Grady to Lavin's short stories contending that parts of the novels could easily succeed as short fiction.

“Two bad novels” is Mary Lavin's dismissive description nowadays of The House in Clewe Street¹ and Mary O'Grady,² the only two novels she ever did write. She has wished that “novels could be torn down like houses”.³ But there they are; in fact they are neither all bad, nor all that bad; and they are both puzzling and revealing to the reader who is concerned to define and isolate the central, essential qualities of Mary Lavin's writing.

It is, indeed, difficult to see why she wrote them, what it was she was trying to do, when she had already launched...