Maeve Brennan: A Place in the Mind

This book explores the intricate interplay between physical spaces and psychological landscapes in the works of Irish-American author Maeve Brennan. Brennans writing is now classed amongst the most important of twentieth-century Irish womens fiction, having undergone a significant reclamation and reappraisal in the 30 years since her death. Single and childfree for most of her life, Brennan eschewed the securities of family and home, experiencing an otherness that she shared with her fellow New Yorkers, many of them left, she wrote, hanging on to a city half-capsizedmost of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their lifes predicament. It is a suitably ambiguous expression for a writer who cultivated an interstitial existence, whose stories inhere within a dream cycle of reiterative pasts, and whose works augment and elevate the canon of radical Irish fiction.