Secrets Study Guide

Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1942, and spent his childhood living with his parents, brother, great aunt, and grandparents. Many of MacLaverty’s stories deal with the political tensions of his childhood, as he was raised Catholic during the Troubles in Northern Ireland (a conflict between unionists loyal to the British-controlled government and nationalists who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland). MacLaverty’s stories may also be informed by his father’s early death, as they often center around the harsh truths of loss and grief. A sign painter whose profession brought him in close contact with carcinogenic paints, MacLaverty’s father died when the author was only 12. MacLaverty began writing at a young age: he remembers receiving his first payment for a story in primary school, when a teacher gave him sixpence for an essay titled “A Rainy Day.” Nevertheless, MacLaverty did not excel academically and even failed his English A-level exams. He left school to spend 10 years as a medical lab technician before attending Queens University in Belfast to study English and teaching. While at Queens, MacLaverty wrote for student writing magazines and joined an influential writing club run by the British poet Phillip Hobsbaum. In 1967, he married Madeline McGuckin, and the couple had four children. By 1975, the Troubles were making Belfast increasingly violent, so the family moved to Scotland. MacLaverty became a full-time writer in 1981, after publishing his first novel, Lamb, in 1980. He went on to write four more novels, six short story collections, and two children’s books, in addition to numerous radio-plays, screenplays, teleplays, and libretti. The author currently resides in Glasgow, Scotland with his family. In 2021, at the age of 79, MacLaverty published a new collection of short stories titled Blank Pages.

Although the action of “Secrets” takes place many years after World War I, the war is an important historical context for John and Mary’s relationship. John was a soldier in World War I while he and Mary were together. He then became a Catholic monk and ended his relationship with Mary in order to process the trauma of the war. Although “Secrets” is fictional, the trauma both John and Mary experienced was common for many World War I survivors. The war was an international conflict that involved much of Europe, the United States, Russia, Turkey, the Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia from 1914 to 1918. One of the deadliest conflicts in history, World War I killed over 9 million soldiers and 5 million civilians worldwide. Due to the psychological effects of surviving this war, historians refer to the generational cohort that reached young adulthood during World War I as the “lost generation.” Ernest Hemingway popularized this term in the epigraph for his 1926 novel, The Sun Also Rises, which read, “You are all a Lost Generation.” The phrase conveys the disoriented spirit that many veterans and survivors adopted during the post-war period. Like John from “Secrets,” many of the men who survived the war suffered acute mental health problems and returned home disillusioned. And like Mary, many women lost romantic partners to the war and remained unmarried after the war ended. The fictional characters of “Secrets” therefore exemplify World War I’s very real psychological toll on the “Lost Generation.”

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.