The Springs of Affection - Softcover

Brennan, Maeve

4.14

516 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006551491 ISBN 13: 9780006551492

Publisher: Flamingo, 2000

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A modern classic – a collection of tales about Dublin from an unsung master of the short story

Never before published in the UK, Maeve Brennan’s Dublin stories are unsung masterpieces.

Brennan left her native Dublin for the States before she was twenty years old, in 1934, and for most of her life worked for the New Yorker, writing book reviews, fashion notes – and these magnificent stories.

The stories, set mainly in suburban, lower middle-class Dublin between the wars, are divided into 3 sections: the first set of stories are autobiographical childhood sketches; the second and third sections contain Brennan’s masterpieces – a series of tales about two families, the Derdons and the Bagots, and the disappointing, lonely marriages which lie at the heart of each family.

Up there with the great short story writers – Katherine Mansfield, Chekhov, George Mackay Brown, etc.

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Review:

Ireland is once more the source of great, and disturbing, fiction. Most of you will not have heard of Maeve Brennan before opening this volume, yet the quality of her stories is cause for wonder. The first several are autobiographical sketches of her childhood in 1920s Dublin. In one, she takes her brother with her to the Poor Clare nuns, a closed order. As the little boy is only two, he gets to see the hidden lives about which his older sister is so curious: "I imagined them, silent and swift, of all ages, descending upon Robert from every part of the convent." In another, following the treaty that turned Ireland into a free state, "some unfriendly men" twice come looking for her father, a Republican. One raider even thrusts his head up the fireplace, only to cover himself and the living room in soot. Despite the disarray, her mother rejoices. "And with us chattering a delighted, incredulous accompaniment, she laughed as though her heart might break."

In Brennan's acute hands, this proverbial phrase has more sorrow than joy about it, and in the collection's two other sequences, the emotions are far more raw. Husbands and wives are deadlocked in loveless marriages--the men longing for escape, the women desperate for contact. These are visions of powerful feelings, powerfully quelled, and there are some heart-freezing juxtapositions. One story ends with a young couple coming together; in the very next, 27 years later, ill will is everywhere. But Brennan, whose life seems to have been even more tragic than that of any of her characters, can also anatomise peace, or at least respite. In "The Carpet with the Big Pink Roses on It," Mrs. Bagot and her child and pets (also on the shakiest of ground with Mr. Bagot) fall into an afternoon slumber. "They all slept safely. There wasn't a sound in the house. Nobody came to the door. Nobody saw them. There on the bed they might all have been invisible, or enchanted, or, as they were for that time, forgotten." Alas, such states of grace are momentary in Brennan's houses. According to William Maxwell, the title novella--a brilliant anatomy of envy and hate--"belongs with the great short stories of this century." So do several other pieces in The Springs of Affection. --Kerry Fried

Review:

‘Superb. Maeve Brennan could sing with words.’
Irish Times

‘Remarkable stories... which give a striking sense of largeness, as disturbingly profound as if Brennan had written a major novel.’
TLS

‘A book that deserves its place in any serious library of Irish writing.’
Sunday Tribune

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