SOURCE: Lanters, José. Review of Two Lives, by William Trevor. World Literature Today 66, no. 2 (spring 1992): 345-46.

In the following review, Lanters offers a favorable assessment of Two Lives.

The lives of each of the female protagonists who form the focus of the two complementary novels in William Trevor's Two Lives, for all their differences of place, time, and circumstance, are touched by tragedy and loneliness, and in each instance the woman's imagination plays both a confining and a liberating role. Readers who know Trevor's work well will find the predicaments of these women familiar from some of his other stories and novels. Mary Louise Dallon in Reading Turgenev is like so many unworldly young girls in 1950s small-town Ireland when she, through inexperience, poverty, and circumstance, finds herself trapped in a marriage to an unsuitable older man whose harmless but weak nature cannot shelter her from his vindictive...