Maeve Brennan : Homesick at 'the New Yorker - Hardcover

Angela Bourke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224062603 ISBN 13: 9780224062602

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2004

Synopsis

Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres. She was seventeen when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington DC, where he was Irish Minister throughout World War II. Maeve worked writing fashion copy at Harper's Bazaar until 1949, when William Shawn invited her to join the New Yorker. Tiny, impeccably groomed, and devastatingly witty, in William Maxwell's words, 'to be around her was to see style being invented'. She wrote important fiction, criticism and Talk of the Town pieces for the New Yorker magazine throughout its most influential period in the 1950s and '60s, focusing on memory, migration and identity; her material, and women's lives. As this richly researched and wide-ranging book makes clear, Maeve Brennan's effect on the people who met her, her eye for human behaviour, clothing and domestic settings, her unsparing reading of literature, her memory of home and her courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America make her an icon of the twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

Angela Bourke is the author of The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (winner of several awards, including the Irish Times Literature Prize for Irish Non-Fiction), and By Salt Water (stories). Born in Dublin, where she still lives, she has spent long periods in the USA, and held visiting academic positions at Harvard University, Boston College and the University of Minnesota. A leading scholar in interdisciplinary Irish Studies, Angela Bourke writes in Irish and English, and makes frequent appearances on tv and radio. She is Senior Lecturer in Irish at University College Dublin, The National University of Ireland, Dublin.

From Publishers Weekly:

Bourke (The Burning of Bridget Cleary) writes a sensitive biography of writer Brennan, who came to the U.S. from Ireland as a teenager (her father was the first Irish ambassador to the U.S.) and in 1949, in her early 30s, joined the New Yorker to write about women's fashion. Tiny, fiercely intelligent and impeccably groomed, Brennan was cherished by her colleagues. William Maxwell, a close friend, edited her stories—mainly fictionalized accounts of her Irish childhood, which he greatly admired—for the magazine. She also wrote a "Talk of the Town" column under the pseudonym "The Long-Winded Lady." Yet behind the archly sophisticated persona, Bourke writes, was a fragile, alienated woman who, following a failed marriage to fellow writer St. Clair McKelway, drifted into an eccentric middle age and serious mental breakdown before leaving the New Yorker. She died in an obscure nursing home in 1993. Bourke, who teaches at University College, Dublin, draws a portrait rich in New Yorker history and modern Irish feminist history alike, one likely to do much to foster a new readership for Brennan's work. 8 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0224062603
• ISBN 13: 9780224062602
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1