Maeve Brennan(1917–1993)

Maeve Brennan was born at 48 Cherryfield Avenue, Ranelagh on the south side of Dublin on 6 January 1917, second daughter of Robert Brennan, a Wexford-born Republican who had fought in the 1916 Easter Rising at Wexford and had been the Department of Foreign Affairs press officer of the Dáil Government across the War of Independence, and Una Anastasia Bolger, also a Wexford Republican. The household was the Catholic-Republican professional one of the early years of the Free State: the father moved into the Free State diplomatic service on the 1922 settlement, served as Irish minister to the United States from 1934 to 1947, and the family lived in Washington from 1934. Maeve, then seventeen, came with the family to the United States in 1934 and was schooled at the Immaculata Seminary in Washington and then at the American University. She took the BA in 1938 at twenty-one and stayed in the United States after the family's return to Dublin in 1947.

She moved to New York in 1941, at twenty-four, on a junior copy-editor's post at the *Harper's Bazaar* magazine fashion-and-arts desk. The Bazaar years through 1941 to 1949 were the apprenticeship: editing the fashion and arts features that the magazine ran across the war and post-war years, working alongside the fiction editor Carmel Snow and the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and writing on the side a body of small short stories that the *New Yorker*'s fiction editor William Maxwell read across the late 1940s and that brought her in 1949 to the staff of the *New Yorker* magazine at 25 West 43rd Street, where she stayed for the next twenty-five years.

The *Long-Winded Lady* column in the magazine's *Talk of the Town* section, beginning in 1954, gave her the public-facing literary identity by which most contemporary readers knew her. The column was a first-person observational sequence of pieces, signed only *The Long-Winded Lady*, on the life of mid-Manhattan: the conversations overheard in cheap restaurants on Sixth Avenue, the encounters of the immigrant-Irish-Italian-Polish working-class boarding houses of the West Side, the dramas of the workmen-and-streetwalkers and shopkeepers and stenographers and waitresses and elevator operators of the commercial blocks of mid-town. She wrote a hundred and fifty *Long-Winded Lady* columns across the period 1954 to 1981. They were collected in *The Long-Winded Lady* (1969) and (posthumously) in *Maeve Brennan: The Talk of the Town* (1997).

Her short fiction was published continuously across the same period: about thirty stories in the *New Yorker* between 1953 and 1977, collected in *In and Out of Never-Never Land* (1969) and *Christmas Eve* (1974). The major Brennan stories were the Ranelagh-set sequence of about fifteen pieces on the Dublin childhood she had left at seventeen: the slow tense unhappy marriages of the parents and grandparents and aunts of the Cherryfield Avenue household, the Republican-Catholic Dublin middle-class respectability under which the unhappiness was kept, the recognitions and slow-burning resentments that the children watched across the kitchen and back-garden of the Ranelagh house. Maxwell at the *New Yorker*, who edited every one of the Brennan stories, called her in his published correspondence the most fastidious writer of post-war American magazine fiction. She married the *New Yorker* writer St Clair McKelway in 1954; the marriage broke up acrimoniously in 1959 over McKelway's alcoholism and was the last sustained domestic relationship of her adult life.

The last fifteen years of her life were the slow public decline. From the late 1960s onwards her writing began to fall off (the final *New Yorker* fiction submission was in 1973); she was diagnosed with a psychiatric illness in 1972 (the contemporary diagnosis was simply *nervous breakdown*; the post-mortem assessment by William Maxwell and her late biographer Angela Bourke describes a combination of long-term clinical depression, alcoholism and acute paranoid episodes), spent intervals in a series of New York YWCAs and small Catholic-charity women's shelters across the 1970s and 1980s, and was eventually placed by the *New Yorker* welfare fund in a Lawrence, New York nursing home in 1988. She died at the nursing home on 1 November 1993, seventy-six years old. Her name was almost forgotten by the time of her death. The post-1993 rediscovery has been slow but durable: William Maxwell's 1997 *Yale Review* essay, Angela Bourke's 2004 biography *Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker*, the 2016 BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, and the continuous re-publication of *The Springs of Affection* (the 1998 collected stories) have made her one of the recovered post-war Irish-American short-story writers of senior critical reputation. The Brennan name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Ó Braonáin* (descendant of Braonán, the moist or sad one), the foundational Wexford-and-Carlow surname of the southern Leinster border country; she carried it from the Ranelagh Cherryfield Avenue household into the post-war American magazine-fiction canon.