LITERATURE & CONVERSATION

“Reading Maeve Brennan is like watching a master jeweler construct a ticking watch from an array of tiny, inanimate parts -- her exquisite skill in piecing together the emotional landscape of her characters is evident in every line…with scathing wit.” – The New York Times

Daughter of the famous revolutionary nationalist Robert Brennan, Eamonn De Valera’s first ambassador to the U.S., Irish writer Maeve Brennan (1917-1993) was a New York literary icon, admired as much for her intelligence and wit as her beauty and style. Brennan wrote for Harper’s Bazaar as a fashion copywriter and then joined the staff of The New Yorker where asa social diarist and columnist she threw herself into the glamorous New York literary circles, forging a tight group with the bright, volatile martini-soaked men she wrote with. She remained at The New Yorker for thirty years, recording her own observations of city life in the famed Talk of the Town column as "The Long-Winded Lady" while simultaneously writing tender, memory-filled fiction that reflected her own upbringing in Ireland. She occasionally visited family in Ireland and her cousin Roddy Doyle reflects on her reviewing books for The New Yorker, isolatedin his family garden in Rory and Ita. Although she lived very publicly and vividly, Brennan maintained a distant independence from those around her, living on the cliff edge, and never making a home for herself. Brennan called herself “a traveler in residence” of New York, writing through heartbreaks, divorce, loneliness and eventual mental illness but is today remembered for her glory days as an independent, intelligent and glamorously successful woman and writer.