In the following essay, Koenig compares Lavin's novels The House in Clewe Street and Mary O'Grady to Lavin's short stories contending that parts of the novels could easily succeed as short fiction.

In the following essay, Scott considers Lavin's fascination with the human mind, particularly the female mind, as evinced in her short fiction.

In the following essay, Shumaker examines the use of sacrificial women characters in the short fiction of Lavin and Edna O'Brien.

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

In the following essay, Peterson elucidates the influence of Katherine Mansfield's short stories on Lavin's short fiction.

In the following essay, Dunleavy investigates the origins and development of Lavin's short story “A Memory.”

In the following excerpt, Dunleavy traces Lavin's literary development and evaluates her contributions to the Irish short story.

In the following essay, Neary asserts that “The Becker Wives” provides valuable inside into the “Irish quest for identity.”

In the three collections of stories published in the 1940s [Tales From Bective Bridge, The Long Ago and Other Stories, The Becker Wives and Other Stories], Mary Lavin established the emotional drama and technical strategy of her art. In story after story, the emotional ordeal of her characters is created out of the clash of opposed interests and sensibilities…. Gradually emerging out of these early stories, then, is the portrait of an Irish middle class peopled by lonely, sometimes bitter characters ...

In the following essay, Burnham examines Lavin's stories published in The Dublin Magazine, including “Miss Holland,” “A Fable,” “Brigid,” and “An Akoulins of the Irish Midlands,” and discusses her relationship with editor Seumus O'Sullivan.

[In the following excerpt, Shumaker focuses on the protagonists from Lavin's stories "A Nun's Mother" and "Sarah" and argues that the "martyrdoms" of both heroines can best be understood in the context of Catholic notions of the suffering Madonna.]

In the following essay, Dunleavy traces the origins and development of Lavin's story “Happiness.”

In the following essay, Mahlke discusses Lavin's brief foray into stories with political themes, focusing on “The Patriot Son” and “The Face of Hate.”

[In the essay below, Hawthorne focuses on language and meaning in Lavin's story "Happiness," arguing that the story suggests an incongruence between language and meaning.]

[In the essay below, Hogan reflects on Lavin's works and concludes that the overall mood of her stories and novels is agnostic.]

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. (p. 69) Mary Lavin's [stories demonstrate her] own observation of the force of the "intuitive imagination" [and] … her apprehension of a "plane...

Lavin's fiction cannot be placed alongside the best from other cultures, but it can be seen, at full maturity in a few stories, as a quietly respectable contribution to the mainstream narrative action of the Irish story. That fictional technique is not at all like the tendency in the great novels of Joyce, Beckett or O'Brien to lyricize itself through poetry into some grand design which creates out of the minutest parts cosmological and metaphysical schemes of reality…. Miss Lavin...

[In the following review, Peterson remarks on the themes of Lavin's stories and praises them as "remarkably insightful and intimate."]

[In the following obituary, Clarity provides an overview of her life and career and comments on the style and major themes of her fiction.]

[In the following review of A Family Likeness, Brown comments on Lavin's themes and style.]

[In the review below, Brown comments favorably on Lavin's talents as a short-story writer.]

[Mary Lavin writes] most of the time about people who appear to be living, at first, in a state of inertia, in the lethargy of country life: then we notice that they are smoldering and what her stories contain is the smoldering of a hidden life. Her short stories are as dense as novels and we shall gradually apprehend the essence of complete life histories … and they make the novel form irrelevant. They give a real and not a fancied view of Irish domestic life and it combines the moving with the frig...

[In the obituary below, the critic comments on Lavin's literary career.]