SOURCE: "William Trevor's 'A Meeting in Middle Age' and Romantic Irony," in Journal of the Short Story in English No. 16, Spring, 1991, pp. 19-28.

In the following essay, Doherty determines the influence of James Joyce's "A Painful Case" on Trevor's "A Meeting in Middle Age."

Many Irish writers have worked the theme of isolation, and William Trevor is one of the present masters. In his novel of 1965, The Boarding House (1968), he has his central character, Mr. Bird, the man who runs the boarding house (an analogue for the creative artist as he creates the boarding house as his own work and to suit himself), admit to a specialist's interest in loneliness:

Mr. Bird said he had studied the conditions of loneliness, looking at people who were solitary for one reason or another as though examining a thing or an insect beneath a microscope. The memory of Mr. Bird was...