Book review: A welcome return to shelves

'The Rose Garden', a story collection, is the third of Maeve Brennan's books to be reissued by The Stinging Fly Press 

Maeve Brennan looked more like a fashion editor than a writer of intense, finely-honed stories.

• The Rose Garden 
• Maeve Brennan 
• The Stinging Fly Press, €15 

Maeve Brennan was an Irish-born writer based in New York in the mid-20th-century. 

Photographs show a trim, elegant woman dressed stylishly in black, with her hair pulled tightly back from her face into a chignon, and a steady, unsmiling gaze.

She looks more like a fashion editor than a writer of intense, finely-honed stories, often both heart-breaking and satirical, at other times just plain hilarious, praised by writers as varied as John Updike, William Trevor, and Clare Boylan.

The Rose Garden, a story collection, is the third of her books to be reissued by The Stinging Fly Press in Dublin. 

They are beautifully presented, uniform editions, the others being The Springs of Affection, her Dublin stories, and The Long-Winded Lady, a compilation of her anonymous New Yorker pieces, many originating from incidents in her daily life as a single woman in Manhattan.

It is a warm tribute that she is published in Ireland by The Stinging Fly, a biennial literary review that has encouraged many of today’s story writers. 

The first book they published, back in 2007, was Kevin Barry’s debut collection. Other authors they have published in book form include Colin Barrett, Wendy Erskine, and Danielle McLoughlin.

Brennan came from a privileged background, as Angela Bourke explains in her useful introduction.

She grew up in Ranelagh, and moved to the US with her family at 17, when her father, Robert Brennan, was sent to Washington as a diplomat by Éamon de Valera. Five years later, he was made ambassador.

Brennan made connections socially which led to her being hired by Harper’s Bazaar as a fashion writer.

Her father’s status no doubt helped her to get her first job, but it was sheer talent which took her to the New Yorker as a staff writer, with regular slots on the prestigious ‘Talk of the Town’ pages.

A brief marriage to a fellow journalist, also fond of cocktails and parties, during which she lived in an exclusive “arty” community on the Hudson River, supplied the background for the stories of wealthy suburbanites that open this collection: “Herbert’s Retreat is a snug community of 40 or so houses that cluster together on the east bank of the Hudson thirty miles above New York City.”

'The View from the Kitchen' is told entirely from the point of view of the Irish maids employed in these trophy homes, down-to-earth women who satirise their employers’ antics, seeing the shallowness under the glitzy facades.

But there is more than social satire going on here. The Bride shows the sad reality of these maids’ lives lived far from their birth families, as they age and accept unhappy compromises. 

 The only beauty she has ever known was in her eagerly awaited annual visit to the convent’s rose garden on the one day a year it was opened. 

Quite how Maeve, who left middle-class suburban Ireland at 17, could know the detail of this deeply sad story is a mystery.

Brennan lived mostly in small hotels and occasionally apartments around Manhattan, sometimes borrowing seaside houses in the Hamptons in the winter with her beloved black Labrador, Bluebell, who features in several stories, told largely from the dog’s point of view.

Brennan developed mental health problems in later life. Like many of her characters, she had no one to look after her apart from her former employer, the New Yorker, which did so generously.

How good to see her back in print in Dublin as well as the US, inspiring another generation to write complex but entertaining stories.

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