SOURCE: Murphy, Catherine A. “The Ironic Vision of Mary Lavin.” Mosaic 12, no. 3 (1979): 69-79.

In the following essay, Murphy discusses Lavin's use of “intuitive imagination” in her short fiction.

Frequently in Mary Lavin's stories the normal world view of an individual is suddenly transfigured by the awareness of an extended dimension of reality. This extended dimension, Miss Lavin implies, is a larger cosmos enveloping and consistently influencing the normal world, though its existence is not consistently perceived.

Other writers have suggested their awareness of a dimension of reality which exists beyond ordinary consciousness and which is apprehended in times of heightened imaginative activity. E. M. W. Tillyard speaks of a “kind of reality” known when the mind's equipoise is disturbed:

There are … times when in the realm of action even the simplest and most normal people find their scale of reality upset. Under the stress of war, or love...