Marriage is one of life’s great mysteries. What makes a marriage work? What makes it fail? Why do certain couples simply come apart, while others, however patently incompatible, continue to exist together in a twilit half-life, joined by some invisible and unbreakable bond? Marriage is a bargain; a poor bargain for all too many.

Tolstoy’s famous claim that all happy families are alike has been disproved time and again—there are many, many ways of being happy, or at least contented—but his corresponding dictum that each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way is unarguable: the unhappy marriage, in particular, has always been a staple of literature. David and Dora Copperfield, Molly and Leopold Bloom, Charles and Emma Bovary, Jason and Medea, Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Dorothea and Edward Casaubon, Swann and Odette, Anna and Alexei Karenin, Hester Prynne and Roger Chillingworth, Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond, Nora and Torvald Helmer, Jude and Sue Fawley, Humbert Humbert and Charlotte Haze: there are almost as many, and as various, ways of being unhappily married in literature as there are in life. Every so often we encounter some middle-aged or elderly couple who appears so grotesquely ill-suited that our only response is to wonder how on earth they could have come together. Life seldom offers us an explanation; good fiction does.

The Irish-born short-story writer Maeve Brennan left a very slim output of work upon her death in 1993, but among her stories are six that, taken together, comprise a superb and harrowing portrait of a truly miserable marriage. Along with her other best stories, they have recently been published together as The Springs of Affection, with an introduction by her New Yorker colleague and editor William Maxwell, himself a fiction writer whose close attention to domestic detail and low-key, implied tragedy is not at all unlike Brennan’s. But Maxwell is a kinder writer than Brennan: his subject is the sadness inherent in love, or thwarted love, and he lacks, for better or worse, Brennan’s sharp and even cruel touch.

Maeve Brennan was born in 1916, three months before the Easter Rebellion, and spent her first seventeen years in the Ranelagh neighborhood of Dublin, in a small brick house which, Maxwell rightly points out, “is her imagination’s home”: all three of the central families in The Springs of Affection reside in exactly such a house, always located on a dead-end street and looking out, in the rear, on a garage and a tennis club.

In 1934 Maeve Brennan’s father was appointed the Republic of Ireland’s first envoy to the United States, and the family moved to Washington, where Maeve enrolled in Georgetown University. When Robert Brennan’s term ended, he returned with the rest of the family to Dublin, but Maeve elected to stay in America permanently. She settled in New York and was hired as a staff writer by William Shawn at The New Yorker; over a period of fifteen years her observations of New York City, “communications from our friend the long-winded lady,” appeared in “Talk of the Town.” She also wrote a number of short stories, most of which first appeared in the magazine. They were subsequently published in two collections, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974). Houghton Mifflin has assembled the best of these in The Springs of Affection.

Brennan’s own experiment in married life lasted only five years. In 1954 she become the fourth wife of St. Clair McKelway, a once-glamorous New Yorker writer and editor who had, by that time, begun his descent into alcoholism and manic-depression. “The couple drank martinis and lived beyond their means,” as Mary Hawthorne recently observed in The London Review of Books, “and the magazine looked after them.”

After the marriage broke up in 1959, Brennan began work on her best stories, a cycle about a Dublin couple named Hubert and Rose Derdon. She had written one story about them, “The Poor Men and Women,” in 1952; now she began in earnest to chronicle their history.

Rose Derdon’s father had died two days before her tenth birthday, and this unexpected death stunted her in some fundamental way. She had adored her father; to her he represented generosity, imagination, and love itself. Together they  

had looked forward to her tenth birthday. They had both been so busy thinking of the Big Day, and talking about it, that they had paid no attention at all to the days that went before it, except to cross them off the calendar with a pencil. The father had drawn a bright red star around the Big Day, but he had paid no attention at all to the days that went before it, and neither had she, except that they were both glad, every evening, that another day could be crossed off to show them that they were that much nearer to the day they were both looking forward to. All the days before her birthday had been ordinary days, dull workaday days, not to be valued but only to be pushed out of the way, and then one of the ordinary days had turned around and made itself into the most important day of all.

The pervasive sense of waste in this passage presages the entire pattern of Rose’s subsequent life. She will grow up into a pretty, winsome girl, later a superficially capable woman, but emotionally she never moves beyond the small child bewildered by her father’s loss. By the time she is in her fifties—the period in which these stories are largely set—she has turned into an unattractive and inconsequential person whose face habitually “wore a self-conscious, almost disdainful look, the look of one who has found nothing to criticize so far but who fears that at any moment she might find herself among people who are beneath her and who will try to be too familiar with her”: the antithesis of what her beloved father would have hoped for her.

She annoys her husband Hubert, far more intelligent than she, almost beyond endurance. “Her pretensions, the pitiful air she wore of being a certain sort of person, irritated him so much that he could hardly bear to look at her on the rare occasions— rare these days, anyway—when they went out together.” Something went wrong in the very early days of their marriage: some vital opportunity was missed, some crucial moment allowed to pass unrecognized. From that moment Rose began her lifelong withdrawal from her husband. “Rose was afraid of him, and she never made any attempt to control the fear, no matter what he said to her… . That was what defeated him at every turn, and that is why he gradually, or finally—he could not have told how it happened—gave up any attempt to get on any kind of terms with her.” Hubert is very far from being a violent man, and Brennan, like the first-rate writer she is, leaves ambiguous the question of whether Rose’s fear is real or feigned. In my opinion, it is feigned: the putative fear provides Rose with an excuse from communicating with her husband on his own level, from behaving as an adult with another adult, an equal. Rose will not grow up.

The Derdons have a single child, John, and they have ruined him. From John’s earliest childhood Rose smothered him with love, a love from which she energetically sought to exclude Hubert, and the innocent child went along with her agenda. “This knowledge, that Hubert knew no better, formed the foundation and framework of the conspiracy between them that made their days so interesting and that gave a warm start to most of their conversations. They were always talking about Hubert.” In the initial estrangement between father and son, Rose was without any doubt at fault, but, in writing the boy off too soon, Hubert also sinned.

Now in his twenties, John has disappeared into the priesthood, thus escaping the marital impasse at home and the possibility of repeating it. Neither parent is happy about his vocation, but Hubert at least is resigned. “John was a poor example of a fellow, weak and timid and with no aptitude for anything and no inclination toward anything… . For a fellow like that, becoming a priest was as good an answer as any.” Brennan’s characters have a marvelous tendency to voice their ironies quite unconsciously.

Rose is an infuriatingly stupid woman; Hubert has intelligence but lacks wisdom. Their life together is a prison and a waste, a fact that Hubert comprehends but cannot change. He comprehends, too, that their plight is not unique. Listening to the neighbors one evening, he hears

the quarrelsome old woman next door scolding her middle-aged daughter, who was unmarried and lived at home, doing the housework and cooking and easing her occasional rebellious rages with loud crying fits… . and he heard the Donovans’ big collie crying pitifully as it strained at the chain that held it to the cramped kennel that had been its home from a puppy… . He heard more than he could bear to hear.

After Rose’s death, Hubert torments himself with his inability to mourn or even to exult. Examining the flimsy items she has jealously hoarded in boxes—old bills and recipes and bits of fabric—he is overcome by the futility of it all. “The contents of the chocolate boxes revealed a mind given over entirely to trivialities and makeshift, always makeshift, making do, making last, putting to use somehow, wasting nothing except her time and her life and his time and his life.”

Even as the Derdon series was underway, Brennan began writing another group of stories about a second couple, Delia and Martin Bagot. Here is another troubled marriage, although it would be hard to characterize it as entirely unhappy. The Bagots are younger, more attractive, somewhat better off than the Derdons. Their first child, a boy, died before he was a week old, and Delia’s grief was so intense as to send her almost mad. Now life is, at least on the surface, back to normal and they have two small girls. Martin, however, is emotionally distanced from the family; he has taken to sleeping in the spare room for a reason that neither he nor Delia fully understands. Delia and Martin are friendly, and not unaffectionate, but there is no real communication between them.

These are fine stories, but as a group not quite on the level of the Derdon ones, largely because of their emotional diffuseness. There is never any definitive moment between Delia and Martin, never any way for the reader to know, or even to intuit, the reason for their fundamental separateness. The focus is primarily upon Delia, as she goes dreamily about her unremarkable quotidian round. A nervous, well-meaning woman of rather limited intelligence, Delia Bagot bears more than a passing resemblance to Evan S. Connell’s great character Mrs. Bridge, and like Mrs. Bridge she is oddly affecting for reasons that are hard to understand. As Maxwell observes, Brennan possessed “the ability to suggest something devastating while seeming to be making an innocuous statement.”

Two stories in the series stand out far above the rest. The first is the beautiful “Stories of Africa,” in which a moribund bishop, a friend of Delia’s dead father, pays her a visit. As she listens to the kind old man reminisce about the beloved farm where she grew up, Delia somehow regains a sense of self, and of wholeness. The final story, “Springs of Affection,” is a small masterpiece. Here Delia and Martin are dead, and Martin’s twin sister Min, a bitter old woman, presides over their belongings and wears Martin’s wedding ring on her own finger: “She, standing alone as always, had lived to sum them all up.” As Min recalls the family’s life, particularly her childhood with Martin, we see the way his family’s heritage of loneliness, resentment, and isolation inevitably blighted the golden promise of Martin’s marriage to the girl he loved.

There is yet another cycle of stories in this volume, a collection of seven short autobiographical pieces dealing with Brennan’s early childhood. These are far sunnier than the Derdon or Bagot material, charming, beautifully told chapters from the life of a happy and united family. The best are “The Old Man of the Sea,” dealing with the mother’s irrational and slightly absurd guilt over an indigent apple seller in the neighborhood, and “The Barrel of Rumours,” in which the child Maeve is obsessively curious about the private lives of a mysterious com- munity of Poor Clare nuns in the neighborhood.

All the stories in The Springs of Affection were written between 1952 and 1973. The 1970s marked the beginning of Brennan’s sad decline into schizophrenia. As her psychotic episodes became increasingly frequent, she more or less moved into the ladies’ room and reception area at The New Yorker, an unkempt old lady who talked to herself and sometimes vandalized the offices of her one-time colleagues. The New Yorker staff let her camp out there until her behavior became so violent that she had to be permanently hospitalized. She died in a nursing home late in 1993.

Maeve Brennan was fond of a quotation by her compatriot W. B. Yeats: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.” She followed this implicit advice instinctively and with tremendous style. Brennan is a marvelous and idiosyncratic writer whose work should be far better known than it is.