American readers of William Trevor’s fiction may find themselves at something of a loss to decide precisely what nationality or ethnic identity to assign to this acknowledged master of the short story. The usual epithet for Trevor is Anglo-Irish, which, particularly for readers unfamiliar with Ireland, roughly places him, because he was born and raised in Ireland, went to school there, attended Trinity College, Dublin—and because a quarter of the eighty-odd pieces in his Collected Stories are set in Ireland or are peopled by Irish characters living abroad, usually in England.¹ He himself has for many years lived and written in Devon.

The term “Anglo-Irish” usually either embraces the members and descendants of the Protestant Ascendancy like Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory—prime movers in the Irish Literary Revival; or it brings to mind the fiction written by that wonderful team of cousins who called themselves Somerville and Ross, authors of the “Irish R.M.” stories, whose masterpiece was the novel The Real Charlotte. A somewhat imprecise Celtic mythologizing tendency is evoked in the one case; decrepit country houses, hunt balls, and a Faulknerian preoccupation with lineage in the other.

To associate Trevor with the milieuconjured up by the term “Anglo-Irish” would be a mistake. For one thing, the Anglo-Irish tradition itself has since the nineteenth century become increasingly attenuated. As early as the 1860s, Gladstone’s disestablishment of the (Protestant) Church of Ireland, his Land Acts—and later those of Balfour—in response to the agitations associated