The Rose Garden (41 page)

In 1934, she and her family came to America when her father, Robert Brennan, was appointed the Republic of Ireland's first envoy to Washington. At the end of his term, the rest of the family returned to Dublin, but she stayed on, eventually settling in Manhattan. She was working as a copywriter for
Harper's Bazaar
when, in 1949, William Shawn invited her to join the staff of
The New Yorker.
There she wrote fashion notes, book reviews, and, from 1954, more than fifty sketches for The Talk of the Town. These first-person sketches, which she once described as a series of snapshots “taken during a long, slow journey not through but in the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and coldest and most human of cities,” were collected in
The Long-Winded Lady
(1969). The book was reprinted, in an expanded, posthumous edition, in 1998.

Maeve Brennan published her first short story, “The Holy Terror,” in 1950. She followed it with forty others, most of which she gathered into two volumes,
In and Out of Never-Never Land
(1969) and
Christmas Eve
(1974). In 1954, she married St. Clair McKelway, then the managing editor of
The New Yorker,
and until their divorce a few years later lived with him in Snedens Landing, a snug community up the Hudson River—the inspiration for the fictional Herbert's Retreat. She later rented houses on Cape Cod, on Long Island, and in New Hampshire, but mostly she lived in residential hotels in and
around Times Square and Greenwich Village. She loved animals, especially cats, and for many years kept a black Labrador retriever named Bluebell.

Maeve Brennan's final contribution to
The New Yorker
appeared in 1981. In November 1993, after more than a decade of mental illness, she died, in New York, at the age of seventy-six.
The Springs of Affection,
a selection of her Dublin stories, was published in 1997.