Dec 24, 2024
Dec 08,2024
We present an extract from Angela Bourke's introduction to the new edition of author Maeve Brennan's short story collection The Rose Garden, published by The Stinging Fly Press.
The Rose Garden, now in a lovely new Irish edition, is the second batch of twenty stories from the unmistakable Dublin-born, New York-based, writer Maeve Brennan (1917–1993). The Stinging Fly has already given us The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin in 2016, and her 'Notes from The New Yorker’, The Long-Winded Lady, a year later. This volume completes Brennan’s published short fiction, though more of it may yet come to light as her reputation continues to grow—she moved apartments often, usually leaving things behind. Christopher Carduff, the brilliant fiction editor who put these books together for US publication between 1997 and 2000, discovered her savage, exquisite 1940s novella, The Visitor, in typescript in a university archive.
Brennan spent over thirty years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, where all but one of these stories first appeared, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s. She was a puzzle to her mostly male colleagues—fearsomely intelligent, elegantly feminine, tiny in stature, she was also very funny—and an enigma to the magazine’s readers. They weren’t aware that the author of stories about two little girls and their mother, with a dog and two cats in Dublin, or Irish maids in wealthy American homes, was also the apparently carefree ‘long-winded lady’ who from time to time contributed short, rueful, elegiac, often piercing, observations of Manhattan to ‘Talk of the Town’. For many years hers was the sole female persona in that section.
But Brennan had a plan. When The Visitor first appeared in print in 2000 in the US, as a slim, perfect, hardback, it became clear that her urgent vision had been fully formed in her twenties, years before she joined the most successful magazine in the English-speaking world. Carduff’s note at the end of the novella called it a ‘ferocious tale of love longed for, of love perverted, and denied... one of her finest achievements.’ For its back cover, Nuala O’Faolain wrote, ‘[T]here is nothing miniature about the forces at work in a story as violent underneath as it is demure on the surface... [Its] variations on revenges taken... will stay with the reader forever.’ Translations into German and Italian, published within a couple of years, bore out those insights. It’s clear now that long before Brennan wrote the stories collected in The Rose Garden, she was in complete control of her art, working in a form she had essentially invented for herself, moving back and forth through time, delivering elements of narrative as though dealing cards at speed, to make something dazzling and seamless. She built that method in the service of her two great preoccupations, which drove almost everything she wrote: first, how the cold, controlling hand of the Catholic church brought about the intergenerational sclerosis of human life in ‘respectable’ twentieth-century Irish families; and second, the experience of Irish immigrants in America. Her stories of the lives of girls and women connect these two consistent themes of her writing to each other.
The Rose Garden, with mostly American settings, unforgettable characters, and stories so carefully arranged, is the book that demonstrates the process. The title story is right in the middle, placed like a delicately constructed bomb, to mark its importance as key to Brennan’s work. Preceding it are stories about unglamorous women. Those that come later feature a woman who is Brennan, in later life, with her animals, alone, reflective, calm.
NEW: Very happy to announce the publication of our third Maeve Brennan book: The Rose Garden with an introduction by her biographer, Angela Bourke. In shops around the country this week and also available online.
— The Stinging Fly (@stingingfly) November 12, 2024
Cover design: @fcondon https://t.co/T1exEHG0Wa pic.twitter.com/LXhO6qYkNE
Brennan could never forget that the vast majority of Irish women who moved to the United States led lives profoundly different from her own. As economic migrants, usually with little or no education, they worked in New England textile mills—about which she knew nothing—or in the homes of well-off white Americans. She knew many such people, and skewered them repeatedly in the stories she set in an exclusive, arty community on the banks of the Hudson River, which she calls Herbert’s Retreat. It’s based on Snedens Landing, now known as Palisades, where Brennan lived during her brief marriage in the 1950s; Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique (1963), was one of the neighbours. The first seven stories in this book unmask their pretensions and spell out their bluffs. They articulate her profound empathy with the women who were not received as she was. Taken together with Mary Lambert in the title story, and Mary Ramsay, who was ‘The Holy Terror’, these women remind us of how freakish Brennan’s literary seriousness seemed in the post-war decades when she was producing her finest work, and of the price she paid for it. In a letter to her editor at the end of 1963, she wrote, ‘And this shame I feel all my life—I was as ashamed of having a little talent as another might be of being born without a nose.’
The Irish maids in these stories, young and middle-aged, witness the least edifying moments of the people they work for. On the bus that takes them to Sunday mass they exchange satirical impressions of their employers’ antics, to cement their own frail social bonds. The stories show these women struggling against profound disadvantage, exiled from the convivial environments where some of them grew to adolescence, while others were in ‘orphanages’; working all hours, mostly alone; oppressed and disregarded in the only occupations—the only homes—available to them. When these stories appeared in The New Yorker in the 1950s, alternating with the sunlit ‘Bagot’ stories now collected in The Springs of Affection, readers seem to have found them merely comic.
The Rose Garden is published by The Stinging Fly - find out more here.
About The Author: Angela Bourke’s biography, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at The New Yorker, was published in London and New York in 2004.
