Born to Irish parents in Walpole, Massachusetts, on 11 June 1912, Mary Lavin moved to Ireland with her family a decade later and went on to become one of the country’s most notable short story writers. Educated at a convent school, Loreto College, St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, before studying English and French at University College Dublin (UCD), Lavin wrote an MA thesis on Jane Austen, later abandoning a doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf to pursue a career in writing. While working on the dissertation, Lavin wrote her first story, “Miss Holland”, which was published in
The Dublin Magazinein 1939. She married William Walsh, a Dublin solicitor, in 1942, was widowed in 1954 after she had achieved considerable success as a writer, and was left to run a farm as well as care for…
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Citation: McLoughlin, Dolores. "Mary Lavin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 03 September 2014 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=2634, accessed 23 November 2024.]
