SOURCE: Fitzgerald-Hoyt, Mary. “William Trevor's Protestant Parables.” Colby Quarterly 31, no. 1 (March 1995): 40-5.

In the following essay, Fitzgerald-Hoyt explores Trevor's portrayal of middle-class Protestant characters in Ireland in the short story “Lost Ground” and the novella Reading Turgenev.

Whether he writes about a rural woman seeking unlikely romance in a remote dance hall, a self-deluded Ascendancy family during the Famine years, or an aging teacher trying to break the cycle of sectarian violence, William Trevor has contributed a rich array of characters and scenes to contemporary Irish literature. With impressive imaginative power, like a literary chameleon he takes on the coloration of Irish people far removed from his own experience: he is a Protestant who writes about Catholics; a man who writes about women; an expatriate who writes so convincingly about the country he left four decades ago that poet Eamon Grennan has commented, “‘… he picks up a stone...