SOURCE: "The Garden and Trevor's 'System of Correspondence,'" in William Trevor, Twayne Publishers, 1993, pp. 9-18.

Morrison is an American educator and critic with a special interest in Irish literature. In the following excerpt, she analyzes "The News from Ireland" from a cosmological perspective, maintaining that Trevor attempts to connect past and present in his fiction through a complex series of mutual interrelationships.

When Mr. Erskine, the Pulvertaft's estate manager, begins courting Miss Heddoe, the English governess, in "The News from Ireland," he invites her "to stroll about the garden" and boasts that he "reclaimed the little garden [that surrounds his own house], as the estate was reclaimed." In the Ireland of 1848 this vast walled demesne of hills, lakes, trees, shrubbery and flower gardens, orchards and kitchen gardens contrasts starkly with the famine outside. Thus in purely secular terms this estate is an Eden, a garden of abundance...