SOURCE: MacKenna, Delores. “We Are the Stuff of History.” In William Trevor: The Writer and His Work, pp. 107-32. Dublin: New Island Books, 1999.

In the following essay, MacKenna examines Trevor's portrayal of the conflict in Northern Ireland in his short fiction.

It is the landscape of the mind which is of importance to a writer; where he actually lives is irrelevant. He can travel in his imagination to any place and create a context for his characters. William Trevor continued to live in England and although he visited Ireland frequently, by the early 1970s he had gained sufficient distance from the country to enable him to write about it with the objectivity of an outsider, but with a native's appreciation of its social and political complexities.

In common with other countries of the Western world, Ireland had experienced great social changes during the 1960s. There was relative prosperity...