Maeve Brennan

This book explores the intricate interplay between physical spaces and psychological landscapes in the works of Irish-American author Maeve Brennan. Brennan’s writing is now classed amongst the most important of twentieth-century Irish women’s 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-capsized––“most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life’s 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.

“Edward O’Rourke has written a sensitive and lucid analysis of the world and work of Maeve Brennan. Scholarly but never scholastic, his book shows him as one who has the gift of explanation rather than simplification. He has a heightened awareness of the nuances of Brennan’s style along with a sure grasp of the sociocultural realities out of which her writing came. His book will bring this gifted and unusual woman to a new generation of readers.”

Prof. Declan Kiberd, author of Inventing Ireland (1996) and Ulysses and Us (2009)

Edward O’Rourke completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published on the topics of women in urban space, femme theory, and twentieth-century Irish women's writing. O’Rourke's research interests include postcolonial literature and the representation of mania in the diasporic literature of women writers. He currently teaches at Mount Sackville in Dublin.

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