Mary Lavin in 1973

This leaves the writer free to be close to her characters – in a way which also brings them close to us : there is nothing that any of them does or experiences which could not be part of our own doing or experiencing.

“Characters exist for me before the story. Some place, some time, I observe something – an idea, someone’s concern, a situation – and for some reason it stays alive in me”. The story, she explains, develops out of her pondering how the characters she has in mind would behave.

The 60-year-old short-story writer whom this transatlantic visitor meets in a Dublin hotel in 1973 has not been working on a canvas of even an England-writ-small – but has been chronicling one small corner of rural living in an Ireland still populated by stern priests, downtrodden or defiant women, bitter men : the whole of it pocked by lonely lives and mean, calculating motives…And yet the stories are accessible to this American, a lifelong metro-dweller.

Mary Lavin is “rooted” in another sense too : after the death of her first husband, most of her time went on running the farm and on raising three young daughters. Yet this very circumstance she counts as a blessing : “I did not get a chance to write more stories than I ought, or put more into them than ought to be there”.

Beneath the unadorned surface of her stories, life smoulders : what is conveyed with immense force is the possibility of a fierce conflagration – its terror enhanced because as yet only intimated.

Robert Ostermann is an American Graduate of University College Cork and a retired Editor