Mary Lavin was born in
East Walpole,
Massachusetts, 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, Lavin and Nora lived with Nora's family (the Mahons) in
Athenry in
County Galway. Afterwards, they bought a house in
Dublin, and Lavin's father, too, came back from America to join them. Lavin attended
Loreto College, a convent school in central Dublin, before going on to study English and French at
University College Dublin (UCD), graduating with both bachelors and masters degrees. She taught French at Loreto College for a while, and became a PhD student, studying the work of
Virginia Woolf. In or about 1937, she gave up her studies and started to write short stories. According to some accounts, her father approached
Lord Dunsany, the well-known Irish writer, who had a home near Bective, and asked him to read some of Lavin's unpublished work. Dunsany met Lavin in autumn 1937 Her first published short story was "Miss Holland", which appeared in
The Dublin Magazine in 1939. In 1942, Lavin's first book was published - this was
Tales from Bective Bridge, a volume of ten short stories about life in rural Ireland. The book was a critical success and won the
James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. That same year, Lavin married William Walsh, a Dublin lawyer. Over the next decade, the couple had three daughters and moved to "Abbey Farm" in
County Meath, which they purchased, and which included the land around
Bective Abbey. Through the later 1940s and into the 1950s, Lavin's literary career flourished; she published several novels and collections of short stories during this period. Her first novel,
The House in Clewe Street, was serialised in
The Atlantic monthly magazine before its publication in book form in 1945; a second novel, ''Mary O'Grady'', followed. ==Widowhood and later career==