When Aunt Mary reads to the protagonist, she chooses excerpts from 19th literary works, including
Lorna Doone, by R.D. Blackmore,
Persuasion, by Jane Austen,
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, and
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Additionally, “Secrets” describes World War I’s impact on two members of the “Lost Generation,” the generational cohort that came of age in the years between 1914—1918. Ernest Hemingway, himself a member of this generational cohort, popularized this term in the epigraph for his 1926 debut novel,
The Sun Also Rises, in which he quotes novelist and playwright Gertrude Stein telling him, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway’s novel actually pushed back against this statement, representing the generation’s resiliency as well as its trauma. Finally, while “Secrets” explores the human cost of World War I, much of MacLaverty’s writing focuses on the psychological toll of a more recent conflict: the Troubles of his native Northern Ireland. MacLaverty’s most well-known novel,
Cal, published in 1983, tells the story of a young Catholic man who is recruited to fight for the Irish Republican Army and ultimately falls in love with the widow of a police officer he helped murder. In stories such as this one, MacLaverty studies ordinary people’s daily lives, often against the backdrop of extreme violence. Critics celebrate his ability to represent the complexity of these everyday stories with elegant yet simple prose. At the beginning of his career, he honed this writing style with the Belfast Group, a highly regarded writer’s circle run by the English poet Phillip Hobsbaum, and later, the Irish poet Seamus Heaney throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. The Belfast Group’s enduring influence on one another can be seen in the similarities between Heaney’s poetry and MacLaverty’s prose. Like much of MacLaverty’s work, Heaney’s poetry focuses on loss and resilience. His volume,
North, published in 1975, contains elegies for the many lives lost to the Troubles. Both Heaney and MacLaverty gave voice to the plight of Northern Ireland, using their literature to access pathways of grief, compassion, and hope.