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A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed

Returning to the family house in Dublin after the death of her mother in Paris, 22-year-old Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her embittered grandmother

Diana Hendry
Maeve Brennan.  Karl Bissinger Papers, University of Delaware Library, Newark, DE, USA
EXPLORE THE ISSUE 25 January 2025
issue 25 January 2025

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became.

Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir.

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