SOURCE: Dunleavy, Janet Egleson. “Mary Lavin, Elizabeth Bowen, and a New Generation: The Irish Short Story at Midcentury.” In The Irish Short Story: A Critical History, edited by James F. Kilroy, pp. 145-68. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1984.

In the following excerpt, Dunleavy traces Lavin's literary development and evaluates her contributions to the Irish short story.

By the end of World War II, the Irish short story had become an established subgenre of twentieth-century literature. Its form and content, pioneered before World War I by George Moore and James Joyce, had been redefined by Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain (“the Romulus and Remus of Irish short fiction,” in the words of Mary Lavin, whose later achievement drew praise from them both). In Irish and in English, Liam O'Flaherty had extended the range of models against which writers who began publishing in the thirties and forties might measure their own work...