SOURCE: Mahlke, Regina. “Mary Lavin's ‘The Patriot Son’ and ‘The Face of Hate’.” In Studies in Anglo-Irish Literature, edited by Heinz Kosok, pp. 333-37. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1982.

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.”

Critics began to protest almost immediately after Mary Lavin's first story with a political theme had appeared in 1956. Elizabeth Bowen disliked The Patriot Son [The Patriot Son, and Other Stories] as a title for a short story collection as she thought that other stories in the book had “better-found” themes.¹ Augustine Martin even called it “that irreverent footnote to Irish revolutionary literature”² and Frank O'Connor in his otherwise enthusiastic article “The Girl at the Gaol Gate” wrote:

So an Irishman, reading the stories of Mary Lavin, is actually more at a loss than a foreigner...