In the following essay, Schirmer provides a thematic and stylistic analysis of Trevor's short fiction.

In the following essay, MacKenna examines Trevor's portrayal of the conflict in Northern Ireland in his short fiction.

In the essay below, Rhodes examines five of Trevor's short stories concerning the Irish troubles and finds that they share similar characters and themes.

In the following interview, Trevor discusses his background, the creative process, and the influences on and major themes of his fiction.

In the following essay, Larsen explores shared themes in Trevor's two novels Fools of Fortune and The Silence in the Garden.

In the following excerpt, Paulson commends Trevor's sensitive and realistic portrayal of gender relations in "The Ballroom of Romance," "Kathleen's Field," and "The Wedding in the Garden. "

In the following essay, Morrison investigates the role of evil in several of Trevor's short stories.

Rhodes is an American educator and literary critic with a special interest in Irish literature. In the following excerpt, he explores the theme of secrecy in Trevor's stories, asserting that it is "a means of directing our attention to his most important fictional concern: the mystery of human personality, behind which may also preside some assumptions, conscious or otherwise, about dimensions of the Irish personality. "

In the following essay, Sänger traces the role of Turgenev's work in Trevor's novella Reading Turgenev.

In the following essay, Clark considers Trevor's use of epiphanies in his stories and argues that they differ significantly from modernist usage of epiphanies.

In the following essay, Hildebidle contrasts Fools of Fortune to "Matilda's England" as he discusses Trevor's views on Ireland and England.

In the following essay, Tillinghast discusses the defining characteristics of Trevor's short fiction through an examination of the pieces in Collected Stories.

In the following review Tillinghast examines Trevor's treatment of Irish culture in The Collected Stories.

In the following essay, Gitzen explores the themes of loneliness and self-delusion in Trevor's work.

In the following essay, Core provides an overview of Trevor's work, discussing recurring themes and Trevor's critical reception.

In the following essay, Haughey finds similarities between Trevor's “Two More Gallants” and James Joyce's “Two Gallants,” perceiving the former's story as an “updated commentary on the legacy of Ireland's colonial experience.”

In the following review, Banville finds parallels between Alice Munro's Selected Stories and Trevor's After Rain.

In the following essay, Doherty determines the influence of James Joyce's "A Painful Case" on Trevor's "A Meeting in Middle Age."

Morrison is an American educator and critic with a special interest in Irish literature. In the following excerpt, she analyzes "The News from Ireland" from a cosmological perspective, maintaining that Trevor attempts to connect past and present in his fiction through a complex series of mutual interrelationships.

Price is a well-respected American novelist, poet, short story writer, and critic. In the following positive review of The Collected Stories, he examines the scope and major themes of Trevor's short fiction, praising the "range of knowledge and depth of feeling" of the short stories in the collection.

In the following review of The Collected Stories, Price argues that Trevor's short story writing is consistently strong but that his novels are better.

In the following excerpt, Morrison discusses Trevor's Irish nationality and recurring themes within his works.

In the following favorable review of The Hill Bachelors, Oates characterizes the main thematic concerns of Trevor's short fiction.

In the following essay, Fitzgerald-Hoyt explores Trevor's portrayal of middle-class Protestant characters in Ireland in the short story “Lost Ground” and the novella Reading Turgenev.

In the following mixed assessment, Banville deems Two Lives as “more interesting than enthralling.”

In the following mixed assessment of Two Lives and The Collected Stories, Allen derides the pedantic, overly-political nature of Trevor's short fiction set in and around Northern Ireland.

In the following excerpt, Bell explores the defining characteristics of the stories in After Rain.

In the following review, Krist argues that if readers give Excursions in the Real World a careful reading, they will learn a great deal about the author.

In the following essay, Bonaccorso emphasizes the moral nature of Trevor's short fiction.

In the following essay, Bonaccorso delineates the role of history in Trevor's stories “Beyond the Pale” and “The News from Ireland.”

In the following excerpt from her Preface, Paulson argues that Trevor is one of the finest modern short story writers and that he is not appreciated adequately in the United States.

O'Faolain is an English novelist and short story writer. In the following review, she examines the tension between reality and fantasy in Trevor's Two Lives.

In the following excerpt, Gitzen offers a thematic analysis of Trevor's early short stories.

In the following mixed review of Two Lives, O'Faolain claims that Trevor “is not here at the top of his form.”

In the following review, Lasdun surveys the strengths and weaknesses of Trevor's short fiction, deeming the stories comprising After Rain as some of the author's best work.

In the essay below, Fitzgerald-Hoyt analyzes "Kathleen's Field" and "Events at Drimaghleen" to support of her argument that Trevor breaks typical stereotypes of Irish women.

Pritchett, a modern British writer, is respected for his mastery of the short story and for what critics describe as his judicious, reliable, and insightful literary criticism. In the following essay, he considers the "obscure dignity" of characters in Lovers of Their Time, and Other Stories.

Theroux is an American fiction writer, critic, and travel writer who, since 1963, has lived outside the United States, first traveling to Africa with the Peace Corps and later settling in England. Many of his novels and short stories have foreign settings—Kenya in Fong and the Indians (1968), Malawi in Girls at Play (1969) and Jungle Lovers (1971), Singapore in Saint Jack (1973)—and feature characters whose conflicting cultural backgrounds, as well as their personal conflicts, provide the sub...

In the following review, Lesser considers the concepts of truth and self-knowledge in After Rain.

In the following review, Bowman argues that despite Trevor's romantic depiction of the homeless, Felicia's Journey is well written.

Waugh is an English novelist, journalist, and nonfiction writer. In the following laudatory assessment of The Ballroom of Romance, he examines the characters in Trevor's short stories, asserting that characters "who in ordinary life would merely be depressing suddenly become objects of compassion, and as such afford keen enjoyment. "

In the following excerpt, Curb discusses the pessimistic and dark nature of the stories comprising After Rain.

In the following excerpt, Prose commends the range and quality of the pieces in Collected Stories.

In the following review of Felicia's Journey, McGrath praises Trevor's ability to create memorable characters and a satisfying resolution to a dramatic story.

In the following excerpt, McGraw praises the insight and steadiness of Trevor's narrative voice in After Rain.

In the following review, Maitland faults the conclusion of Felicia's Journey, but still finds the work powerful and engaging.

In the following review, Murtaugh praises the believability and disturbing nature of the stories in The Hill Bachelors.

In the following excerpt, Krist praises the complementary relationship between the novellas Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria.

In the following review, Taylor delineates the tragic aspects of the stories in After Rain.

In the following review, slightly revised by the author in 2003, Binns asserts that some of Trevor's stories in After Rain are among the writer's most imaginative and display a well-wrought craftsmanship.

In the following review Towers argues that while some of the stories in Family Sins are skillfully told, the collection does not measure up to Trevor's earlier work.

In the following excerpt from a laudatory review of After Rain, Filbin maintains that Trevor “examines human behavior with such a keen eye and fine hand, that one thinks of a Henry James gifted with a modern brevity.”

In the following review, Fitzgerald-Hoyt agues that Trevor achieves a coherency in the twelve stories about revelations contained in the collection After Rain.

O'Donoghue is an Irish poet, critic and editor. In the following favorable review of The Collected Stories, he discusses the defining characteristics of Trevor's short stories.

From his first novel, The Old Boys, onwards, [William Trevor] has specialized in harrying gentility. His books regularly shepherd into view the well-bred and/or well-heeled: then, unleashing some aggressive predator at them, they depict with sprightly relish the bleating distress and panic-stricken swervings that ensue. The clash between herbivores and carnivores fascinates Trevor. His last novel, Other People's Worlds, absorbedly watched a psychopath wreaking havoc in a nest of gentlefolk. The prece...

William Trevor's reputation has been slow to establish itself in America…. "Other People's Worlds," his most recent novel, received a good deal of praise for its radioactive portrait of a talented sociopath and his victims. Still, Trevor is probably best known for his stories, particularly among writers and critics who recognize a master when they see one. Graham Greene hailed his third collection, "Angels at the Ritz," as perhaps the best in English since &#...

William Trevor is an extremely accomplished writer, and Other People's Worlds is as accomplished as anything he's so far written. Trevor has the professional's knack of allowing key moments to make their effect without help of underlining. The villain-hero of his new novel, Francis Tyte, is a bit-part actor, full-time liar and fantasist who makes trouble for all the women he fastens and fattens on, without himself being troubled by anything more than rage that they're occasionall...

In the following review, Storey examines the style and major thematic concerns of the pieces in Collected Stories.

In the following excerpt, Williams considers Trevor's subtlety in the stories in After Rain.

In the following review, Lively provides a favorable assessment of After Rain.

The three aesthetic challenges of [Other People's Worlds] are to establish Julia's innocence on credible grounds, to show it first as weakness and then as strength, and to intimate, lightly, the sources of Francis's malignity. Trevor succeeds with Julia, but I think he goes too far in the direction of the explicit with Francis. Still, it is a real artistic dilemma; if he tells too little about Francis, then allegory will rear its blunt head; too much, and the mystery around Francis will...

A good short story, like a good poem, exists only in its expression. Its essence is irreducible and immutable. As William Trevor has written (in a review in praise of one of the writers of short stories he most admires, Sean O'Faolain), 'the better the short story the less easy it is to re-tell'. By this criterion, among others, Trevor's short stories are among the best in English…. I have just re-read 59 of [his] stories and I cannot imagine how any of them could be impro...

An English biographer, critic, nonfiction writer, poet, and editor, Ackroyd is known for his novels that focus upon the interaction between artifice and reality and emphasize the ways in which contemporary art and life are profoundly influenced by events and creations of the past. In the following excerpt, he offers a positive assessment of the stories comprising Angels at the Ritz.

William Trevor's characters would be perfectly content to lead decorous, uneventful lives. They work in shops or offices, attend bridge socials and lawn parties, quietly raise quiet families in London or the Irish countryside. Yet calm eludes them. Unbidden and inevitable as physics or original sin, the past catches them up, impartial History tracing out consequences. Each of the dozen stories in Beyond the Pale, Trevor's fifth collection, gauges some repercussion of past on present. Small one...

In the review below, Craig praises Excursions in the Real World as an insightful social commentary, but argues that it is not reveal enough about Trevor.

I liked "Lovers of Their Time," William Trevor's last collection of stories, better than "Beyond the Pale." I still remember with a feeling of pleased surprise a couple of images from that book…. Yet in some of the other pieces in that book I felt that Mr. Trevor indulged himself in a sort of perverse minimalism, a kind of contest with himself to see how little he needed to make a story. Though everyone regards him as a master of understatement, I wonder whether it ...

[William Trevor] is one of the finest short story writers at present writing in the Anglo-Irish modes. His people are those who, in the course of their lives, are so humdrum in their ordinariness, so removed from the power of expressing themselves that he has to efface himself in order to speak for them. They appear to be confused by experience and in moral judgment, but they live by an obscure dignity and pride which they are either too shy or too unskilled to reveal at once: his art is to show they have t...

In the following positive review of Collected Stories, Lanters maintains that Trevor probes both the common and exceptional elements of humanity in his stories.

Can a short story do it all? Can it close in on an intense moment of feeling and dig down to illuminate the psychological whys and wherefores and reach out to touch on themes that lie far beyond the strictly personal? And can it do all this while seeming as spontaneous as gossip, as uncomfortably convincing as an overheard confession on a crosstown bus? The answer is a resounding, grateful yes—as long as William Trevor is doing the storytelling, and then only sometimes…. [Lovers of Their Time ...

William Trevor is one of the acknowledged masters of the short story. He is an Anglo-Irish writer who now lives in Devon and so he is an exiled member of a disappearing social class…. This is Trevor's heritage and it is at once his strength and his weakness. It enables him [in Lovers of Their Time] to present with the most accurate sympathy that desperately principled Irish intransigence which in "Another Christmas" makes an otherwise gentle Irish exile destroy a long-standing fr...

In the following review, Lanters offers a favorable assessment of Two Lives.

"Other People's Worlds," by William Trevor … is a shorter, more efficient novel than [Iris Murdoch's] "Nuns and Soldiers," but bears some resemblances. It, too, has for a heroine a widow who marries a young man financially beneath her, and it, too, demonstrates that such a union, however rashly contracted, cannot be lightly undone. Julia Ferndale, like [Murdoch's] Gertrude Openshaw, is plump but still handsome; like Anne Cavidge, she undergoes a strugg...

[The] story of an evil child is venerable and [William Trevor] brings to his handling of it few approaches that are new. But he does his work with dignity and gives us the best fruits of his talent until almost the end of The Children of Dynmouth. He fashions a character out of the dubious clichés of the age, puts breath in his lungs and blood in his veins, and moulds him into the monstrous Timothy Gedge, abandoned by his father, ignored by his mother and older sister, virtually companionless except ...

William Trevor, like many of the characters in his novels and stories, is something of a con artist. The boring opening to his new novel, Other People's Worlds, is a setup…. That Trevor is willing to lull us for 20 or so pages, only to jolt us back awake by revealing that Francis Tyte, the intended groom [of Julia Ferndale] is in fact an impostor with the sinister mission of violating the peaceful contentment of Swan House, is the first of Trevor's tricks in this novel, one of many mast...

In the following review, Kessler offers a positive assessment of After Rain.

[Some British authors] abide by conventions of brevity, control, and traditional form without ever sounding like under-reachers. Perhaps the best of these is William Trevor, represented this season by Lovers of Their Time…. One sequence of tales in this book aims at nothing less than a recreation of the stunting impact of two world wars on the mind of a rural village. Two stories grapple, at the level of facts of feeling, with the Ulster anguish as endured by Protestants in the South and by Irish Cat...

In the following mixed review, Standen discusses the uneven quality of The Day We Got Drunk on Cake.

Rarely do verbal precision, intelligence, imagination, and compassion converge to produce a talent as awesome as William Trevor's. His eleventh offering to a burgeoning and increasingly enthusiastic American audience further entitles aspiring writers of fiction to despise him a little. Other People's Worlds, with the persuasive intricacy characteristic of Mr. Trevor's short stories, reveals the presence of the demonic in human affairs as most ordinary human beings encounter it…. ...

[In Lovers of Their Time] Trevor's open, persevering sympathies go out to the unrecognised characters of time; ordinary lives shaped through silt and scythe and then forsaken or betrayed by failures of not-so-common understanding. But though his people look back over the England and Ireland of the last 40 years, there's no moistness about the steady eyes which look at them. It's the unimaginative interruption of continuing time's own alterations to which these chronicles draw att...