Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker

The tragic odyssey of Maeve Brennan, The New Yorker's Long Winded Lady, from happy Dublin childhood to Manhattan glamour, from brilliant literary accomplishment to madness, homelessness, death, and rediscovery . Maeve Brennan was an Irishwoman & a New Yorker; an intellectual & a beauty; a daughter, sister, aunt, lover, wife & friend. Witty, stylish, small & quick, she dazzled everyone who met her. She wrote some of the finest English prose of the 20th century, yet she was practically unknown in Ireland during her lifetime, and for 20 years before her death, was forgotten in her adopted America. Rediscovered & republished since 1997, her writings remain in the mind like a previously unknown species of animal or plant. Patiently, almost without mercy, her Irish stories probe the discomforts of quiet, careful, middle-class Dubliners, offering an unparalleled feminine view of a society & a place, an intimate history of modern Ireland; by contrast, her American stories throw the life of privileged New Yorkers & their Irish servants into grotesque relief. Brennan's fiction bores deep into her own memory, and her family's. It returns obsessively to the same houses, the same cruxes in a