{"id":251984,"date":"2026-07-13T01:40:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-12T22:40:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/an-arrow-in-flight-mary-lavin\/"},"modified":"2026-07-13T01:40:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-12T22:40:15","slug":"an-arrow-in-flight-mary-lavin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/1kitap1.com\/en\/an-arrow-in-flight-mary-lavin\/","title":{"rendered":"An Arrow In Flight – Mary Lavin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u201cMaudie, my dear!\u201d She had to stare fixedly at her in an effort to convey the sympathy, which, tongue-tied, she could express in no other way. They shook hands, wordlessly. \u201cI\u2019m deliberately refraining from expressing sympathy\u2014you know that?\u201d said Mary then, as they sat down at the checkered table.<\/p>\n

\u201cOh, I do!\u201d cried Maudie. And she seemed genuinely appreciative. \u201cIt\u2019s so awful trying to think of something to say back!\u2014Isn\u2019t it? It has to come right out of yourself, and sometimes what comes is something you can\u2019t even say out loud when you do think of it!\u201d It was so true. Mary looked at her in surprise. Her mind ran back over the things people had said to her, and the replies. Them: It\u2019s a good thing it wasn\u2019t one of the children. Her: I\u2019d give them all for him.<\/p>\n

Them: Time is a great healer. Her: Thief would be more like: taking away even my memory of him. Them: God\u2019s ways are wonderful. Someday you\u2019ll see His plan in all this. Her: Do you mean, someday I\u2019ll be glad he\u2019s dead? So Maudie apprehended these subtleties too? Mary looked hard at her. \u201cI know, I know,\u201d she said. \u201cIn the end you have to say what is expected of you\u2014 and you feel so cheapened by it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWorse still, you cheapen the dead!\u201d said Maudie. Mary looked really hard at her now. Was it possible for a young girl\u2014a simple person at that\u2014to have wrung from one single experience so much bitter knowledge? In spite of herself, she felt she was being drawn into complicity with her. She drew back resolutely. \u201cOf course, you were more or less expecting it, weren\u2019t you?\u201d<\/p>\n

she said, spitefully. Unrepulsed, Maudie looked back at her. \u201cDoes that matter?\u201d she asked, and then, unexpectedly, she herself put a rift between them. \u201cYou have the children, of course!\u201d she said, and then, hastily, before Mary could say anything, she rushed on. \u201cOh, I know I have my baby, but there seems so little link between him and his father! I just can\u2019t believe that it\u2019s me, sometimes, wheeling him round the park in his pram: it\u2019s like as if he was illegitimate.<\/p>\n

No! I mean it really.<\/p>\n

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You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. 1kitap1.com\/en 1kitap1.com\/en INTRODUCTION Like Myra in her story \u201cA Memory,\u201d Mary Lavin lived in a mews house behind Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. She also had a house on a bend of the river Boyne in County Meath, north of Dublin, a place inhabited by some other characters in her fiction. When I came to Dublin as a student in 1972, Mary Lavin was a familiar presence in the city.<\/p>\n

I watched her as she moved with a sort of stateliness in the Reading Room of the National Library, or as she sat in a small caf\u00e9 known as the Country Shop, or as she drank coffee in Bewley\u2019s in Grafton Street. She was usually alone. She wore black. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled untidily into a bun at the back. Her gaze was kind and sad and oddly distracted, but it had a funny strength as well. She had spent her life describing others and finding strategies to create versions of herself on the page; it was not easy to categorize her.<\/p>\n

Although Lavin\u2019s stories were mostly set in Dublin or in County Meath, they did not deal in predictable local color. And although they were mainly set in the 1940s and 1950s, they have not dated. But neither are they timeless. They belong fiercely to their own moment and emerge from a vision that is exact and precise, deceptively gentle, and then sharp and direct.<\/p>\n

I have no clear memory of how I knew that Mary Lavin was a widow with children at a young age, but I might have read it in The Irish Times. I was interested in the word \u201cwidow\u201d and I would have paid real attention to a writer, or anyone at all indeed, who was a widow, since my mother was one. Or it may have been when we studied a story by Mary Lavin in secondary school called \u201cThe Widow\u2019s Son.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.<\/em><\/p>\n

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