Maeve Brennan(1917–1993)

Maeve Brennan was born at Cherryfield Avenue, Ranelagh, on the south side of Dublin on 6 January 1917, second daughter of Robert Brennan, a Wexford Republican who had fought in the 1916 Rising and become the Dáil's Department of Foreign Affairs press officer, and Una Bolger. The father moved into the Free State diplomatic service and served as Irish minister to the United States from 1934; Maeve, seventeen, came with the family to Washington in 1934, was schooled there and at the American University, and stayed in the United States after the family's return to Dublin.

She moved to New York in 1941 on a junior copy-editor's post at Harper's Bazaar, working alongside the fiction editor Carmel Snow and the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe through the war and post-war years and writing short stories on the side that the New Yorker's fiction editor William Maxwell read across the late 1940s. They brought her in 1949 to the staff of the New Yorker, where she stayed for the next twenty-five years.

The Long-Winded Lady column in the magazine's Talk of the Town, from 1954, gave her the public literary identity by which most readers knew her: a first-person observational sequence, signed only The Long-Winded Lady, on the life of mid-Manhattan, the cheap restaurants and boarding houses and the waitresses and shopkeepers of the commercial blocks. She wrote about a hundred and fifty of them, collected in The Long-Winded Lady (1969).

Her short fiction ran continuously across the same period, about thirty stories in the New Yorker, collected in In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974). The major Brennan stories were the Ranelagh-set sequence on the Dublin childhood she had left at seventeen, the Cherryfield Avenue household watched from the children's side of the kitchen. Maxwell, who edited every one of them, called her the most fastidious writer of post-war American magazine fiction.

Her writing fell off in the 1970s, and she died in New York on 1 November 1993, seventy-six years old. The rediscovery since has been durable: William Maxwell's 1997 Yale Review essay, Angela Bourke's 2004 biography Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker, a BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, and the continuous re-publication of the collected stories The Springs of Affection (1998) have made her one of the recovered post-war Irish-American short-story writers of senior critical reputation. The Brennan name, the Leinster patronymic Ó Braonáin, she carried from the Ranelagh household into the post-war American magazine-fiction canon.