Lannoy, called "the lost Goan/Indian/African novelist" by critic and writer Peter Nazareth,[2] wrote Pears from the Willow Tree, a posthumously published novel, besides short stories.
[1] When she died, her novel Pears from the Willow Tree was unpublished, as were some short stories;[6] the novel was finally published by Three Continents Press in 1989, edited by C. L. Innes, who had become interested after hearing Richard Lannoy read a paper on his wife's life and work.
[4] Pears from the Willow Tree features a Catholic teacher from Goa, raised in the tradition of ideals derived from Gandhi and the Indian Independence Movement.
The title is derived from a proverb, "When a man is confused, he expects pears from the willow tree", which refers to the generation of people coming to terms with the conflict between their Gandhian idealism and the political reality of an independent India.
Inexperienced in creative writing, she began the draft when she and Lannoy were living in North India in the late 1950s; she taught at a school where most of her colleagues were Hindu, and she, a Goan Catholic, was regarded as an outsider.
Now influenced by Elias Canetti and Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Grand Inquisitor", she rewrote much of the novel, recasting some of the characters and introducing the betrayal of all-too optimistic ideals.