ML
built friendships with her early patron, the successful Anglo-Irish writer Lord Dunsany,
and his wife, Lady Beatrice
. Each maintained a regular correspondence with her, Edward Dunsany discussing her writing and Beatrice chatting of...
Literary responses
Mary Lavin
Thomas Kilroy
writes of her characteristic tone as at once sympathetic and demanding, highly moral in the way it negotiates human conduct but entirely flexible in its acceptance of the vagaries of experience.
Kilroy, Thomas et al. “Foreword”. In a Café, Town House, 1995, p. vii - x.
viii
Literary responses
Mary Lavin
In a review for Books and Bookmen at the time of the collection's release, Roger Baker
remarked on the curiously dated, pre-Second-World-War feeling about many of ML
's stories. Though he connected this attribute...
Literary responses
Mary Lavin
ML
chose this story when pressed by Thomas Kilroy to name the one she would choose as the finest expression of her art.
Kilroy, Thomas et al. “Foreword”. In a Café, Town House, 1995, p. vii - x.
viii
Kilroy
feels that this story, like others by ML
, unveils...
Textual Features
Mary Lavin
It has been said to show traits of Clarissa Dalloway and other fictional portraits by Woolf
.
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.