SOURCE: Scott, Bonnie Kime. “Mary Lavin and the Life of the Mind.” Irish University Review 9, no. 2 (autumn 1979): 262-78.

In the following essay, Scott considers Lavin's fascination with the human mind, particularly the female mind, as evinced in her short fiction.

In general treatments of Irish fiction and in articles more specifically on her own writing, Mary Lavin has been acclaimed as a “promising”, “skillful”, and even a “great” short story writer, the encomiums coming from such distinguished sources as Lord Dunsany, Seumas O'Sullivan, Frank O'Connor, Benedict Kiely and V. S. Pritchett. But, even though discovery of her dates back some thirty years, Mary Lavin's fiction has until very recently failed to receive the complex critical investigation which major writing deserves and must sustain. We have been provided initial characterisations of her writing: lists of her favoured themes, her typical stylistic traits and aspects of human experience that she...