Holly and Polly, by Graham Swift

Holly and Polly, by Begoña Devis

SUMMARY

Holly and Polly are two young girls who work in an assisted reproductive clinic. Holly is cheeky with men, she likes saying that they work in an introduction business and teasing them, making them guess what they do.

Holly is also irreverent, she likes making jokes, like creating Latin phrases to describe the sexual act, such as “penis in vagina intro-duxit”, and answering “et semen e-mi-sit”, as if it were a chorus of monks.

Polly is amazed at Holly’s nerve. She’s also shocked at his blasphemous behaviour, despite having been raised as a Catholic. But at the same time, Polly is attracted to her. It is the attraction of opposites, as Polly is shy and quiet, meek and mild.

One day, Holly asks Polly out, who realizes that she is also a lesbian, and that makes her very happy, because she has fallen in love with her.

Polly thinks about how unlikely it is that they ever met. It is as difficult as both, the sperm and the egg, meeting at the right time in a pot at the clinic, which they enter the next day as a couple. And she is also thinking about how ironic it is that the fact of playing God creating a new life is in the hands of two lesbians, who never mixed eggs with sperm in their private lives.

Nonetheless, they’ve found each other, and Polly thinks they don’t need to be ashamed of being a couple. How can they be ashamed of anything in a place where eggs and sperm pass through their hands all day? They have met in the right place. They are happy there, wearing green, like two peas in a pod.

 

PERSONAL OPINION

My personal opinion is that it is a difficult story to read, because it uses a large amount of colloquial language and expressions unknown to me.

As for the story itself, the author is ironic all the time about the fact that two lesbians have in their hands the ability to create new lives using spermatozoa and ovules.

Deep down, he is ironic about how things happen in life, how unlikely it is that the things that happen to us really happen to us, or that we meet the right person at the right time. Actually, everything is amazing in life.

It is also a reflection on the fact that everyone can lead the life they want, where they want, without being ashamed of it.

QUESTIONS

What can it be, the relation between the title and the story?

What do you think of artificial insemination? And what about being a mother without a father? Or about surrogate mothers? Would you prefer one of these methods, or adopting?

What are the two different meanings of the word “date”, or what is the pun between “dating agency” and “getting the date right” at the beginning of the story?

“How things come together in this world”: what do you think is best, design or random? (Think about deciding sex, eyes colour, skin colour…)

Why is it a joke to come from Kildare and have to wear green?

Why is their job similar to being God?

What can it be, the “touch of red in her black hair”?

Do you believe everyone has their “type”? Is there a different type for every different person?

Why does Polly mention Northern Ireland?

Do you trust in young people for important jobs?

For a couple in love, what is it better, to be opposites or to be similar?

Who can give a better piece of advice, a person that is “in” or a person that is “out”? For example, a catholic priest to a marriage, or an out looker to a player.

What do you know about Wilmslow?

Can you guess at a first sight if someone is in love, or if a pair of friends are “friends with a benefit” or lovers?

Are you able to know someone’s sexual preferences at first sight?

 

VOCABULARY

home in on, edge, give up, fellers, youse, turn-off, turn-on, mucky, comprehensive, B.Sc, scrubs, teasing, brashness, being up for it, plainsong, had me in stitches, shred, smoothie, buck passer, lark, detachment, gash, tilt, toss, scrub cap, pod, bumped, coy, canny

Guests of the Nation, by Frank O'Connor

Frank O'Connor at the Wikipedia

Guests of the Nation at the Wikipedia

Guests of the Nation at encyclopaedia.com

Analysis

1935 Movie

TV Movie

Film adaptation

Irish Wars movie

Michael Collins movie

BIOGRAPHY

Frank O’Connor is the pseudonym of Michael Francis O'Connor O'Donovan, he was born in September 17, 1903 in Cork, Ireland, only child of Michael O'Donovan, labourer and sometime British army soldier, and Mary (‘Minnie’) O'Connor, domestic servant. He was raised in an extremely chaotic and poor environment and his early life was marked by his father's alcoholism, debt, and ill-treatment of his mother. His childhood was shaped in part by his mother, who supplied much of the family's income by cleaning houses, because his father was unable to keep steady employment due to his drunkenness. O'Connor adored his mother and was bitterly resentful of his father.

He has recounted the early years of his life in one of his best books, An Only Child, a memoir published in1961 and continued his autobiography in his book, My Father's Son, which was published in 1968, posthumously. In his memoirs, he recalled his childhood as "those terrible years” and admitted that he had never been able to forgive his father for his abuse of himself and his mother.
He received little formal education in Saint Patrick’s School in Cork, but his family's poverty forced him to leave school aged fourteen. As a child he was taught briefly by Daniel Corkery (1878–1964), who was also a later mentor and encouraged his learning Irish.
In 1918, he joined the First Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and served in combat during the Irish War of Independence. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and joined the Anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War, working in a small propaganda unit in Cork City. He was imprisoned in the Gormanston camp between 1922 and 1923.
After this episode he turned against republicanism and political violence generally. His experiences in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War are reflected in The Big Fellow, his biography of Irish revolutionary leader Michael Collins, published in 1937, and one of his best-known short stories, Guests of the Nation (1931), published in various forms during O'Connor's lifetime and included in Frank O'Connor-Collected Stories, published in 1981.
Between 1924 and 1928, he taught Irish in country schools, worked as a librarian in Wicklow, Cork, and continued to train himself for a writing career. In these years he adopted pseudonym “Frank O’Connor” to keep his position as a librarian and retain independence as a writer. He published stories, reviews and translations in The Irish Statesman, Dublin Magazine, The Tribune.
With Sean Hendrick, founded the Cork Drama League to stage continental playwrights such as Chekhov and Ibsen. In 1928 he moved to Dublin to become librarian of Pembroke Library in Ballsbridge.
From 1935 to 1939 he was a director of the Abbey Theatre and worked in close contact with W.B. Yeats, its founder. Two plays were produced by him in the Abbey: In the Train (1937) and Moses Rock (1938). He became best known for his short stories publishing a several number of collections from 1936.
In 1937, he made his first broadcast on Radio Eireann.
In 1939, he married Evelyn Bowen. They had a son and a daughter, and they were divorced in 1953.
In 1941, he produced, The Statue's Daughter, at the Gate Theatre and began working with the BBC in London. Many of his stories, like Midnight Court, were later banned.
During World War II (1939 to 1945), he worked as a broadcaster for the British Ministry of Information.
Following the war, in 1945, O’Connor began a twenty-yearlong association with the American magazine The New Yorker. During this time, he had to readapt his narrative style and innovate some techniques to appeal to his new reading public.
At the age of 48, he became a teacher at Northwester University and Harvard.
In 1950, he accepted invitations to teach in the United States, and worked as a visiting professor. In this country many of his short stories had been published in The New Yorker and won great acclaim. He spent much of the 1950s in the United States.
He married, secondly in 1953 with Harriet Rich of Baltimore, whom he met while lecturing at North-Western University (Evanston -Illinois-). They had one daughter.
In 1961, he had a stroke while teaching at Stanford University and he returned to Ireland. He died from a heart attack in Dublin, Ireland on 10 March 1966.
O'Connor's literary career, which lasted more than 40 years (1922-1966), was very prolific. He published over two dozen volumes of varied literary types: several plays in collaboration and alone, most of them produced at the Abbey Theatre, where he was once a director; translations from the Irish such as The Wild Bird's Nest (1932); verse such as Three Old Brothers (1936); local travel writing such as Leinster, Munster and Connaught (1950); criticism such as Mirror in the Roadway (1956); novels such as The Saint and Mary Kate (1932); short stories in several collections, including Crab Apple Jelly (1944); and the autobiographical volumes An Only Child (1961) and My Father's Son (1969). He also wrote about 300 known pieces of journalism, including many reviews, as well as articles on social, political, and cultural issues. He made about 175 radio and television broadcasts in Ireland and Britain and a few in the United States. 

Frank O'Connor Festival and Prize

Since 2000, The Munster Literature Centre in O'Connor's hometown of Cork has run a festival dedicated to the short story form in O'Connor's name: The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award which is awarded to the best short fiction collection published in English anywhere in the world in the year preceding the festival. The prize is also opened to translated works and in the event of a translation winning the prize is divided equally between author and translator. The award is described as "the richest prize for the short story form" and is one of the most valuable literary prizes for any category of literature.

 

GUESTS OF THE NATION 

Film Inspiration

Guests of the Nation has been filmed several times. The first film was a silent one, directed in 1934 by Denis Johnston and featuring Barry Fitzgerald and Cyril Cusack. The second one, was the Neil Jordan’s award-winning film The Crying Game (1992) which partially adapted the story for another period of Irish revolutionary violence called de Troubles in the 1970s and 80s

 Plot

Guests of the Nation is about two Englishmen, Hawkins and Belcher, who are held prisoner by Bonaparte, Donovan, and Noble, members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), somewhere in Ireland, during the Irish War of Independence in the early 20^th century. The story is told by Bonaparte, who recalls his time guarding both prisoners.
Belcher and Hawkins live in an old woman's house with the two Irishmen, Noble and Bonaparte, who are supposed to keep an eye on them. They all spend a lot of time together arguing, playing cards, discussing politics and religion as if they weren't part of the armed conflict that surrounds them. They have become true comrades and friends.
Donovan, the third Irishman, is the officer in charge of the small Irish group, and he is not so friendly with the Englishmen.
When Donovan informs Bonaparte that although Englishmen are prisoners, they are also being held as hostages, so if the English shoot any of their Irish prisoners, they are going to execute Hawkins and Belcher in revenge, Bonaparte is surprised by this news, and he says that he is not comfortable with the idea of killing them.

The next day, in the evening, while they are playing cards, Donovan asks for the two prisoners, then he notifies them that four Irish soldiers have been executed by de British, including a sixteen-year-old boy, so they are going to be killed in retaliation. They cannot understand what happen because they believe that a friend could never murder a friend they are all friends. Hawkins even offers to leave the British Army and join the Irish, in his opinion friendship is more important than a war. But Donovan ignores this and shoots him. Later, Donovan tries to excuse his action by claiming that he’s only doing his duty, but Belcher says that he is not agree with what duty means, however he doesn’t blame them, and call them “good lads”. Then, Donovan shoots Belcher and kills him, too.

After finishing their "duty" and burying the prisoners, Noble and Bonaparte return to the woman's house very sad. Their reactions to the traumatic experiences they have lived through are different. As Noble and the old woman fall to their knees in prayer, Bonaparte goes outside to look at the stars and listen to the birds, feeling far away from everything and a great loneliness.

This interesting and cruel story shows that people from different countries and with different views on life can be friends and live together in peace. But when it happens in a time of war and everyone has to do their duty, even if their hearts tell them otherwise, they should not put their friendship before their obligations.
We can find several other topics in this story, apart from duty, war and friendship, which are currently very present in our society, and which are sometimes a source of conflict, such as national identity, home and family, religion, spirituality and materialism.

https://www.dib.ie/biography/oconnor-frank-a6631
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/666705
https://www.irishplayography.com/person.aspx?personid=38813
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Frank-OConnor
https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Frank_O%27Connor
https://frankoconnor.ucc.ie/introduction_to_foc.php%3Fteanga=.html
https://prabook.com/web/frank.o_connor/3737936

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/guests-of-the-nation#context

QUESTIONS

Talk about the different characters

    Belcher

    ‘Awkins

    Noble

    Bonaparte (the narrator)

    Jeremiah Donovan

    The woman

Historical context: What do you know about the independence of Ireland?

    1916 Rising

    Bloody Sunday

    Independence War

    Civil War

What is the Stockholm syndrome?

What do you know about the Lima Syndrome?

What do the prisoners and guards do to pass away the time?

Jeremiah has all the time his hands in his pockets. What can this attitude suggest?

“Our lads didn’t dance foreign dances on principle” (372, 9-10). What do you think of this kind of “boycott”? Do you know another one that is curious or singular?

What is your opinion about “cursing and bad language”? Why do you think some people use a lot of 4-letter words?

What is the limit of duty? Can duty be an excuse in front of justice, or in front of your conscience?

They shot the two Englishmen as a retaliation for the shooting of four Irishmen. What is the difference between justice and revenge?

Do you think it would have been a better solution to accept the desertion of ‘Awkings?

How can the Irish Militia prove that they have shot the prisoners if they bury them?

What do you think Bonaparte is going to do after this experience? What would you do?

VOCABULARY

chum, produce, tray, stayed put, took to, arskin, tunics, crochety, hatchet, parlatic, platoon, fleeced, comedown, gulp, fust, strolled, spell, all and sundry, jest, arsk, bleedin', bumped off, put the wind up, hinder, gibing, shifted, sidled, bog, houseen, telling her beads, crabbed

Sinners, by Seán Ó Faoláin

Biography

Seán Proinsias Ó Faoláin was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1900. He studied in a religious school and his primary school was in Gaelic. As he was born as John Francis Whelan, we have to suppose he changed his name into Gaelic. When he went to university in Dublin, he joined the Irish Volunteers, and he fought for the Irish independence. He got disappointed with the outcome of the Independence War and the Irish Civil War and he went  to study in Harvard, in the USA, and then he worked in some high schools and universities in England where he taught Gaelic. He only came back to Ireland in 1933 where he worked in his short stories, novels and in literary magazines.

His most famous book is Midsummer Night Madness, a collection of short stories about the Civil War.
For Irish people he’s a controversial figure, because some of his books were banned for indecency and because he wasn’t satisfied with the creation of the free Ireland as it was. He was very critical with some of conservative aspects of the Irish nationalism and the Catholic Church.
He died in Dublin at the age of 91.

Seán Ó Faoláin the Wikipedia

Plots of some of his stories

SINNERS

This is a story about a religious confession of an orphan girl. She was picked up at the orphanage by Mrs Higgins as a maid. Now she has to go on confession because her patron knows she has stolen her boots and wants to recover them by the way of her avowal to the canon confessor. Mrs Higgins has told the canon about the girl and her pair of boots and asked him to elicit the girl’s “sin” and then make her to give the boots back to her.

But the thing isn’t going to be so easy because there is the secret of confession, and, of course, it’s supposed the confessor cannot know the girl’s sins through another person; and also, because the girl is a simpleton and the canon has no patience with her. The canon is an old man and, after a life of confessions for no good, he is already fed up with the mean spirit of the people, his trivial problems and their failure in improving their morals. Will the girl confess her robbery? Will Mrs Higgins get back her pair of boots? Will the canon be in peace at the end?

QUESTIONS

Talk about the characters in the story:

The canon

Father Deeley

The girl

Mrs Higgins

What does the canon do to control his anger? Do you know other ways to calm you down? Which one do you use?

It seems that in Ireland there are (or were) a lot of orphanages: Why do you think there were so many? Have you seen “Song for a Raggy Boy” or “The Lost Child of Philomena Lee”?

What is a Freemason? What do you know about the Freemasonry?

Do you think is it possible not to commit a “sin” in 5 years? What is the limit between a small “sin” and a big “sin” for you? Can be there a general rule or does it depend of every person in particular?

Do you think confession can help people (like a kind of psychological therapy)?

And penance? Can penance help you when you feel you’ve made a mistake?

The canon is old and Deeley is young. What advantage has an old person to a young person, according he canon? Do you think he is right?

Ambrose Bierce said that a secret is something you tell only to one person. Do you think is it possible to keep a secret? Even for a priest?

What do you think of the confession in general?

VOCABULARY

grille, restiveness, sigillum, pettish, shade, prevarication, forestalled, gospel, lattice, shudder, slur, wisha, gasped, flaking, wan, prying, poking, prodding, picking at, lashings and leavings of, starved, immodest, blunty, whimper, urchins, spittle, gabble, cross, cosily, cokalorum, jade

A Painful Case, by James Joyce

James Joyce at the Wikipedia
A Painful Case at the Wikipedia

Audiobook

Analysis and summaries:

ginevra lee

Complutense

Knapp

Cliffsnotes

 

JAMES JOYCE, by Glòria Torner

James Joyce is one of the most influential and important writers of the 20th century. He is known for his experimental use of language and exploration of new literary methods, including interior monologue, use of complex network of symbolic parallels and invented words and allusions in his novels, especially in his main novel Ulysses.

 

BIOGRAPHY

James Joyce, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, was born in 1882, in Dublin (Ireland) into a middle-class family.

He was the eldest of ten children. At the age of six he went to a Jesuit boarding school called Clongowes Wood College. But, as his father was not the man to be affluent for long; he drank, neglected his affairs and borrowed money from his office, and his family sank deeper and deeper into poverty, Joyce didn't return to Clongowes College in 1891; instead, he stayed at home for the next two years and tried to educate himself. In 1893 he and his brother Stanislaus were admitted to Belvedere College, a Jesuit grammar school in Dublin. Joyce was a brilliant student and there did well academically.

He entered the Trinity College Dublin in 1898. There he studied modern languages, English, French and Italian, and read widely, particularly in books not recommended by the Jesuits. He began to write verses and experimented with short prose passages that he called Epiphanies. To support himself while writing, after graduation in 1902, he went to Paris to become a doctor, but he soon abandoned this idea.

He went back home in April 1903 because his mother was dying. He tried several occupations including teaching; he also began to write his first novel, Stephen Hero, based on the events of his own life, and he also began to write the short stories published as Dubliners in 1914.

Joyce had met Nora Barnacle in June 1904, and they began a relationship until his death; they probably had their first date, and their first sexual encounter, the day that is now known as “Bloomsday”, the day of his novel Ulysses. The couple left Dublin and emigrated together to continental Europe where he taught languages in Pola (Croatia) and Trieste (Italy), where their son Giorgio was born. He also lived for a year in Rome, where he worked in a bank and where their daughter Lucia was born.

Joyce visited Ireland in 1909 and again in 1912, this time with his family. In 1914 he rewrote and completed the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, published in 1916, and he began to write Ulysses.

In 1915 the Joyce’s couple moved to Zürich and in 1916 he published his play Exiles. It was also the year that chapters from Ulysses, his novel in progress, began to appear in the American journal, “The Little Review”. The completed book would not appear until 1922. Ernest Hemingway and Winston Churchill were two of the first to buy the ready famous new book.

Ulysses, the most notable novel of the twentieth century, his main novel, is a gigantic work. All the action takes place in and around Dublin in a single day. The novel is the chronicle of the Dublin journey of the main character, Leopold Bloom, on an ordinary day. The three central characters: Stephen Dedalus, (Telemachus) the same hero of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) a Jewish advertising canvasser, and his wife Molly (Penelope), the unfaithful woman. The events of the novel loosely parallel the events in Odysseus’s journey home after the Trojan War. Joyce employs interior monologue, stream of consciousness, parody and almost every other literary technique to present his characters.

Finding out that he was gradually gaining fame as an avant-garde writer, Joyce set himself in Paris to finish his Ulysses. His last book was Finnegan's Wake, published in 1939. Joyce's eyes began to give him more and more problems, and he travelled to Switzerland for eyes surgery.

Joyce died at the age of 59 in January 1941, in Zurich for a perforated duodenal ulcer.

SOME FACTS ABOUT JOYCE

He was the eldest of ten brothers and sisters.

His family were very poor, but his father had some airs. He didn’t belong to the working classes, he had “business”, and in all of them he failed. He was not a hard-working man, but he wanted some education for James: after a lot of pleading, he got a seat for him in a well-known and high reputation Jesuit School.

Joyce studied languages at the University and, after that, he went to Paris to try to study medicine, but he spent his days there reading in libraries.

When he was 22, he met Nora Barnacle, and, in the second date, she masturbated him, and they started being together for the rest of their lives.

The next year, they ran away from Dublin and went to live abroad forever. They lived in Trieste, Rome, Zurich and Paris. At the beginning he worked as an English teacher, and in a bank translating letters from Italian to English. But then he asked money to institutions to write his masterpiece, Ulysses. He got it from sponsors and from the British government. He didn’t earn anything from his books.

Although we can imagine him as a bohemian artist, he was not any of it because he was essentially a family man. He worked doing English classes (for instance, he taught English to Italo Svevo) to provide for his family, and, apart from this, he wrote following his artistic call.

He had a lot of health problems with his eyes, and there were some periods when he was almost blind. But he continued writing all his life. His wife was a bit illiterate and she only read one of his books, the collection of poems Chamber Music. She asked him to write more commercial books.

He died at the age of 59 of a sudden illness.

WORKS

James Joyce is known for his experimental novel Ulysses. In this novel, Joyce tells us about one day in the life of a very ordinary man. It’s a thick book and hard to read, but it has a lot of radical fans. Before this, he wrote some poetry (but he wasn’t very happy with it), some short stories under the title of Dubliners (following Ibsenian ideas and style), a novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man (a Bildungsroman), and another experimental novel, more extreme than Ulysses, under the title of Finnegan's Wake.

In Dubliners, Joyce tried to make a portrait of Dublin’s moral personality, and he arranged its stories according to the ages of a person (childhood, youth, maturity, old age). He had a lot of difficulties to publish it because a lot of real people and real places appeared in the book, and he didn’t want to change anything to hide real names under fictious names. They are “classical” texts, very different from his most famous works. The last story, “The Dead”, has been made in a film directed by John Huston.

A PAINFUL CASE

According to one letter to his brother, this story was one of the worst of the collection, but then it’s a story with two books studying only it.

It is a short story belonging to the group of “maturity”. It narrates the voluntary loneliness of a self-made single man and the involuntary one of a married woman. The man is very proud of being alone, because this way he can spend his free time on his intellectual and lofty hobbies. He meets a married woman, but he doesn’t want an affair, he only wants a listener. When the woman tries to make some advances, he breaks up the relationship because he thinks that between a man and a woman friendship is impossible. Afterwards, the woman has a depression and dies in an accident in a railway station, and he feels (and not only knows) his loneliness.

The form of the story is a classical one: first introduces the characters, then there is a conflict and a solution for this conflict, and last of all, a moral reflexion.

 

 

QUESTIONS

Can you describe in your own words Mr Duffy (that in Gaelic means “black” or “dark”)? Age, personality, physical appearance, job, interests…

From the description of his lodgings, what can deduce about Mr Duffy’s personality?

Why do you think that the Maynooth Catechism is “sewn into the cloth cover of a notebook?

What do you know about Hauptmann’s Michael Krammer?

And about Nietzsche?

Mr Duffy eats arrowroot cookies because they are healthy. Do you think eating healthily can make a person better? What is your opinion about “you are what you eat”?

Mr Duffy thought that he could be a rebel sometimes and rob a bank. Was this only a bluff, or was it for real?

Describe Mrs Sinico in your words

Mrs Sinico is pictured as having an intelligent face. Do you think that the face can be the mirror of a person’s personality or qualities?

What do you know about astrakhan?

How did Mr Duffy and Mrs Sinico come to know each other?

What kind of friendship did they have? What did they usually do in their dates? Was there any love between them?

What was Mrs Sinico’s role for her husband? And for Mr Duffy?

What city is Leghorn? Do you know other cities with names very different from the native language?

Can you explain why he liked Mozart, according to your opinion?

What do you know about the Irish Socialist Party? What were Mr Duffy political ideals?

Talk about Mrs Sinico’s family.

“Every bond is a bond of sorrow”. What does it mean? Do you think it’s true?

“Friendship between man and woman is impossible because there must be sexual intercourse”: what is your opinion about this?

How did Mrs Sinico die?

How did the breaking up of her relationship with Mr Duffy affect her?

How did Mrs Sinico’s death affect Mr Duffy? Did he hate her, or did he pity her?

Can you explain the metaphor of the “worm with a fiery head” and the end of the story? (page 9 line 1)

Is it possible to compare this story with Madame Bovary, or Anna Karenina, or The Lady with the Dog? What do they have in common? What differences are there between them?

 VOCABULARY

mean, shallow, double desk, alcove, Bile Beans, saturnine, tawny, hazel, arrowroot, bill of fare, roaming, thinly (peopled), house, plying, garret, timorous, wages, phrasemonger, impresario, propped, haze, buff, reefer overcoat, inquest, league, threadbare, hobbling, shop, gaunt, withheld, gnawed

My Vocation, By Mary Lavin

BIOGRAPHY, by Maribel Mayorga

Mary Josephine Lavin wrote short stories and novels, and she is now regarded as a pioneer in the field of women's writing.

She is particularly noteworthy for her stories on the topic of widowhood, which are considered her finest.

Mary Lavin was born in East Walpole, Massachusetts, EUA, in 1912, the only child of Tom and Nora Lavin, an immigrant Irish couple. She attended primary school in East Walpole until the age of nine, when her mother decided to go back to Ireland. Initially, Mary lived in Athenry, in County Galway, in the West Coast. Afterwards, her parents bought a house in Dublin.

Mary attended Loreto College, a convent school in Dublin, before going on to study English and French at University College Dublin. She taught French at Loreto College for a while. As a postgraduate student, she published her first short story, "Miss Holland", which appeared in the Dublin Magazine in 1938.

In 1943, Mary published her first book, Tales from Bective Bridge, a volume of ten short stories about life in rural Ireland; it was a critical success and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction

In 1954 her husband died. Lavin, with her reputation as a major writer already well established, was left to confront her responsibilities alone. She raised her three daughters and kept the family farm going at the same time. She also managed to publish short stories, and she won several awards for her work, including the Katherine Mansfield Prize in 1961, Guggenheim Fellowships in 1959 and 1961, and an honorary doctorate in 1968. Some of her stories written during this period, dealing with the topic of widowhood, are her best stories.

In 1992, the members of Aosdána (an affiliation of creative artists in Ireland) elected Lavin Saoi (one of the highest honours in Irish culture) for achieving "singular and sustained distinction" in literature.
She died in 1996 at the age of 84.

MY VOCATION

My  Vocation was published in 1956 in the Atlantic  Monthly, a magazine in the USA, thanks to  a recommendation from J. D. Salinger (author of The Catcher in the Rye).

This is a story that talks about family, religion, life in Ireland, and about a daughter who was looking for her vocation: she was thinking of becoming a nun. One day she found in an ad in a newspaper that they were looking for applicants. She did not hesitate to write, and she received a telegram in answer to the application. She lived in Dorset Street and the best thing of Dorset Street was that it was like a big happy family, and everyone was proud of the idea of her going to the missions, although she did not like the idea of going with lepers. It was time for the interview: what did she decide for her future?

QUESTIONS

The “dowry”: does the tradition go on in the case of brides?
The smell of people: do you think people smell according their job? Have you read “The perfume”?
What do you know about Mary Magdalen? What is the irony in the story?
What are the Tiller Girls? And the Gaiety? What do you need to have to be a Tiller Girl?

What is the Seven Churches ritual? Is there something similar here?

In the story they say nuns don’t cough or sneeze because they are like angels. Here, when someone sneezes, we say “Jesus!”, or “Health!”, or, in catholic anglophone countries, “Bless you”. But usually in Great Britain, when somebody sneezes, he or she says “Sorry!” Do you know any different habits about sneezing, or yawning or belching?

What do you need to be a waitress, according to the story?

What kind of girl do the boys choose to get married to, according to the story? Do you know other clichés?

What do you know about Mary Alacoque?

What preparations did the mother do for the nuns visit? How did the neighbours help?

Our protagonist ties a knot in her handkerchief: What do you do when you want to remember something?

What do you know about leprosy and lepers? Have you seen the film “Sweet Bean”? And Papillon? What happened to Gaugin in the novel The Moon and Sixpence, by Somerset Maugham?

What is a Recruiting Officer?

Describe the two nuns that visit the protagonist’s house.

How did the meeting go?

On page 440, line 20, one of the nuns says: “Oh, we have to be ready for all the eventualities”. What do you think she means?

What cab did the girl order for the nuns? Describe cab, horse, cabby…

Tell us about the accident. Did the nuns get hurt?

At the end: is she going to be a nun? How do you know? What is Dollymount?

PREPARE YOUR SPEECH

 

What do you know (from your experience) about nuns? Did you study in a nun’s school? What do you think about your experience?

Tell us your experience about your call/vocation. Is it easy to know one’s call? An important number of students change studies after their first year: why is it so difficult to choose what one wants to be in one’s life? What would you do if you didn’t like your child’s call?

What do you think of Missions or NGOs? Do they really help the people they say they’re helping?

VOCABULARY

cut out, call, hopscotch, sniff, cheapen, sparky, scrub, hold with, hot jar, kneeler, tightly, dead keen, morosely, dowry, harp on one string, start the ball rolling, front, ram, lore, square meal, lug, return room, being any the wiser, raffle, stub, back out of, gorgeous, wear away, pickle, daft, flighty, cabby, bucket, caper