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Maeve Brennan

“The book is notable . . . for Bourke’s first-rate descriptions and analyses of Brennan’s fiction. An impressive portrait.” —Kirkus Reviews

To be a staff writer at The New Yorker during its heyday of the 1950s and 1960s was to occupy one of the most coveted—and influential—seats in American culture. Witty, beautiful, and Irish–born Maeve Brennan was lured to such a position in 1948 and proceeded to dazzle everyone who met her, both in person and on the page. From 1954 to 1981 under the pseudonym “The Long–Winded Lady,” Brennan wrote matchless urban sketches of life in Times Square and the Village for the “Talk of the Town” column, and under her own name published fierce, intimate fiction—tales of childhood, marriage, exile, longing, and the unforgiving side of the Irish temper. Yet even with her elegance and brilliance, Brennan’s rise to genius was as extreme as her collapse: at the time of her death in 1993, Maeve Brennan had not published a word since the 1970s and had

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Maeve Brennan

Maeve Brennan (1917 - 1993) was born in Dublin in 1917, and spent her early childhood in a house on Cherryfield Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin 6, before emigrating to the U.S. with her family as a teenager. She worked at both Harper’s Bazaar and the New Yorker from the 1950s through to the 1970s. Many of her short stories were published at these titles and she became best known to the American public under the pseudonym of ‘The Long-Winded Lady’ via her ‘Talk of the Town’ column at the New Yorker. However, Brennan could not shake off the formative influence that Ireland had on her life, and thus it became the setting of her finest works, which communicate authentic representations of the fear and anxiety that can permeate modern life.

Brennan left behind a legacy of short fiction at her death in 1993; The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin, The Rose Garden: Short Stories and the novella The Visitor. Largely unknown in Ireland until the millennium, Brennan has gradually become more recognised as more and more people become interested in her work and life. Brennan

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Maeve Brennan: On the Life of a Great Irish Writer, and Its Sad End

This essay owes a great debt to Angela Bourke’s essential biography,
Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

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Yesterday afternoon, as I walked along Forty-second Street directly across from Bryant Park, I saw a three-cornered shadow on the pavement in the angle where two walls meet. I didn’t step on the shadow, but I stood a minute in the thin winter sunlight and looked at it. I recognized it at once. It was exactly the same shadow that used to fall on the cement part of our garden in Dublin, more than fifty-five years ago.

Here is Maeve Brennan hanging on, recording a solitary encounter in her last published piece in The New Yorker. On the sidewalk of the city where she had come to live in her twenties and spent the rest of her life, she recognizes, that sunny winter’s day in 1981, the stamp of the house in Dublin where she had passed her childhood. Maeve Brennan and her work had already been lost to public view when she died in 19