SOURCE: Hagopian, John V. “The Technique and Meaning of Lionel Trilling's ‘The Other Margaret’.” Etudes Anglaises 16, no. 3 (July-September 1963): 225-29.

In the following essay, Hagopian examines Trilling's narrative technique in “The Other Margaret.”

When an eminent literary critic, especially of a moralistic Arnoldian persuasion, takes a hand at writing fiction, the result is rarely as distinguished an achievement as Lionel Trilling's short story, “The Other Margaret.” As is to be expected, Trilling's fiction embodies ideas and values which occupy a prominent place in his criticism. “The greatness of fiction”, he has said, “and its practical usefulness lay in its unremitting work of involving the reader himself in the moral life, inviting him to put his own motives under examination, suggesting that reality is not as his conventional education has led him to see it.” (“Manners, Morals, and the Novel,” in The Liberal Imagination, London, 1951, p. 222.) No statement could more...