Irish-American Author
Born 1912 Died 1996
Mary Josephine Lavin was born in the 'Yellow House' at 133 Washington Street in East Walpole, Massachusetts on either the 10th or the 11th June 1912, the only child of Thomas Joseph Lavin and his wife Nora Mahon Lavin. Her parents met whilst onboard a ship sailing to Ireland - Thomas was travelling back to Ireland to buy some horses, Nora was returning home after visiting relatives in America. Thomas succeeded in persuading Nora to return with him to Massachusetts where he was employed as a teamster, but in the end she did not take to Massachusetts, and returned to Ireland in 1922 taking Mary with to her family home at Athenry in County Galway. Her father followed in 1923, and the family later moved to Dublin before settling in County Meath.
Mary attended the Loreto College, St Stephen's Green in Dublin and then University College, Dublin where she read English and French and wrote her M.A. thesis on Jane Austen in 1936. She then returned to the Loreto College to teach French whilst working on her Ph.D. dissertation, taking as her subject the work of Virginia Woolf. At this time Mary had no thoughts of becoming a writer herself as she saw literature as being something that "was written by the dead", but after hearing someone talking "casually of having taken tea with Virginia Woolf", she was sufficiently inspired to write her first short story on the reverse of the typescript draft of her dissertation. The resulting story titled Miss Holland received the customary serial rejections before being accepted by Dublin Magazine and published in 1939.
with the encouragement of Seumas O'Sullivan, the magazine's editor Mary decided to abandon her dissertation and embark on career as a writer. According to tradition her father then brought her work to the attention of his near neighbour, the Lord Dunsany, who supported the publication of her first collection of short fiction, Tales from the Bective Bridge, which appeared in 1942, and later won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for 1943 and helped establish her reputation as a writer.
It was also in 1942 that Mary Lavin married William Walsh, then a Dublin based lawyer, later a politician. Together they bought a farm in County Meath, and had three daughters; Valentine, Elizabeth and Caroline. Her husband however died in 1954 and she was left to run the farm and raise her three children on her own, while sitting down at the kitchen table each evening to continue her writing. A steady stream of stories were published in such periodicals as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker which later appeared in a series of collections. In the meantime she received a condolence letter from an old university friend Michael McDonald Scott, then a Jesuit priest living in Australia. After further lengthy correspondence, Scott was released from his vows by the church and returned to Ireland where they were married in 1969.
She is regarded as being one of the more significant Irish authors of her generation since, apart from Elizabeth Bowen, she was one of the few female writers active in the otherwise male dominated Irish literary world. Her best work is regarded as being the series of 'widow stories' that she wrote featuring the character Vera Traske, which reflected her own experiences of widowhood in the later 1950s and 1960s. Her achievements were recognised by the award of a Guggenheim fellowship in both 1959 and 1961, the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1961, the Ella Lyman Cabot Award in 1972, the Éire Society Gold Medal in 1974, the Irish-American Foundation Literary Award in 1979, and the Allied Irish Banks Literary Award in 1981. In addition she became member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1975 and awarded their Lady Gregory Medal and was also a member of Aosdána, and was elected Saoi in 1992.
She was widowed for a second time in 1990, and later died at a nursing home in Dublin on the 25th March 1996.
Bibliography
Short Story collections
Novels
REFERENCES
Obituary: Mary Lavin, The Independent, Mar 26, 1996 by W.J.McCormack
The Yellow House has been demolished. By Joanne Damish, Walpole Times
http://www.walpoletimes.com/library/yellow_house.htm
Mary Lavin 1912–-1996
http://www.enotes.com/short-story-criticism/lavin-mary
Mary Lavin
http://www.irishwriters-online.com/marylavin.html
Mary Lavin: Biographical Note
http://irishliterature.library.emory.edu/content.php?id=MSS044_1001262