“Getting published in The New Yorker was – and still is today – notoriously difficult,” Gráinne Hurley writes in the introduction to her captivating account of Mary Lavin’s relationship with the famous magazine.

Hurley’s sources are numerous, but consist mainly of 400 letters exchanged between Lavin and her editor, Rachel MacKenzie. Most letters dealt with editorial matters but, as a friendship grew, they became personal and provide valuable insights into Lavin’s writing process and her everyday life.

The book is arranged chronologically and charts Lavin’s career from the moment she was introduced to The New Yorker by JD Salinger in 1957. By then she was already a well-established writer but the New Yorker catapulted her into international fame and provided her with a good income, which, as a widow with three children, she needed.

Who’d rely on short stories for a living? Well, someone with a “first reading” contract with the New Yorker, back then anyway. The first story published funded a deposit on the mews on Lad Lane, which became Lavin’s Dublin home. It was initially a bit of a shambles – but still.

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This book demonstrates the link between literature and money. Lavin always wrote what she wanted to write. But when the New Yorker was publishing her regularly, she was under pressure to produce excellent short stories regularly and often.

Would her output have been smaller had she lacked the financial incentive the magazine offered? The New Yorker published 16 stories, including many of her best, over about 20 years.

[ Mary Lavin: ‘Writing for her was a kind of need. It was the thing that was going to get her through’Opens in new window ]

Several were rejected, too, but Lavin usually found other homes for those that were “not quite right for us”, or “too strong”. Before anything was published, intense editing was the norm. Sometimes the amendments are amusing. A description of a baby’s leaking nappy had to be excised. (Too strong?)

This well-researched book is a rich trove of information on Lavin’s wonderful writing, and on the key role of the editor in the production of literature. Like other powerful publishers, the New Yorker was able to shape literary history.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a writer and critic. She is Laureate for Irish Fiction