12 - William Trevor
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
William Trevor is an Irish writer by birth, and I take it he considers himself an Irish writer still. He left Ireland in 1954 and has settled in Devon. He was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, on May 24, 1928 (but I have seen another birthday ascribed to him) to a family Protestant and middle-class. His father was a bank official with enough money to send him to school at Sandford Park, Dublin, and later to St. Columba's College, Rathfarnham, a school “with a reputation for aloofness, and skill on the hockey field.” At Trinity College, Dublin he read History but not with particular zeal. He left with an undistinguished degree and eventually found a reliable job in an advertising agency in London. In Excursions in the Real World (1994) he writes with equanimity of his early years:
I was born into a minority that all my life has seemed in danger of withering away. This was smalltime Protestant stock, far removed from the well-to-do Ascendancy of the recent past yet without much of a place in de Valera's new Catholic Ireland. The insult and repression that for centuries had been the response to Irish aspirations, the murders perpetrated by the Black and Tans, the heartbreak of the Civil War, were all to be expunged in de Valera's dream of a land “bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths, the laughter of comely maidens; whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of old age.”
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- Irish Essays , pp. 215 - 225Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011