Maeve Brennan: Homesick At The New Yorker - Hardcover

Bourke, Angela

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582432295 ISBN 13: 9781582432298

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2004

Synopsis

The tragic odyssey of Maeve Brennan, The New Yorker's Long Winded Lady, from happy Dublin childhood to Manhattan glamour, from brilliant literary accomplishment to madness, homelessness, death, and rediscovery . Maeve Brennan was an Irishwoman & a New Yorker; an intellectual & a beauty; a daughter, sister, aunt, lover, wife & friend. Witty, stylish, small & quick, she dazzled everyone who met her. She wrote some of the finest English prose of the 20th century, yet she was practically unknown in Ireland during her lifetime, and for 20 years before her death, was forgotten in her adopted America. Rediscovered & republished since 1997, her writings remain in the mind like a previously unknown species of animal or plant. Patiently, almost without mercy, her Irish stories probe the discomforts of quiet, careful, middle-class Dubliners, offering an unparalleled feminine view of a society & a place, an intimate history of modern Ireland; by contrast, her American stories throw the life of privileged New Yorkers & their Irish servants into grotesque relief. Brennan's fiction bores deep into her own memory, and her family's. It returns obsessively to the same houses, the same cruxes in a

About this title

Review:

'A biography to savour and treasure. Bourke's book has wit, sensitivity and insight, everything that Brennan would have approved of' -- Daily Mail, 28th May 2004

'A careful study' -- Sunday Telegraph, 30th May 2004

'An unusually fine biography... Bourke makes you want to read her [Brennan's] four books' -- The Sunday Times, 30th May 2004

'Petite, perfectly groomed and devastatingly witty... This, finally, is the biography she [Brennan] deserves' -- Mail on Sunday, 30th May 2004

'assiduously researched...a rich account of the struggle for Irish independence and the demands of literary life in New York' -- Guardian

'perceptive' -- Independent

From the Publisher:

The first book about Maeve Brennan, the recently rediscovered New Yorker writer from Ireland, who wrote like an angel, and looked like a fashion model, but became homeless in Manhattan in the 1970s and died forgotten in 1993.

About this edition

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 1582432295
• ISBN 13: 9781582432298
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 333