Maeve Brennan left Dublin for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. While her entire thirty years’ writing career was conducted under the aegis of The New Yorker and while she became, both in her fiction and her New Yorker column and “Talk of the Town” pieces, one of the sharpest chroniclers of mid-century New York, the Dublin of her faithfully remembered childhood remained as immediate to her as her adopted city. It is the backdrop for her fictional masterpiece, the six-story cycle about an unhappy couple, the Derdons (republished three years ago in Houghton Mifflin’s selection of Brennan’s stories, The Springs of Affection), and in fact for all of her finest stories.
The Springs of Affection brought together twenty-one of Brennan’s short stories, and now Counterpoint Press has done her admirers the favor of publishing the remaining nineteen, plus an impressionistic sketch from her New Yorker column, “A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street,” in a collection they have named The Rose Garden. Five of these stories are set in Dublin, the rest in and around New York City.
Brennan, who died in 1993 after a decade of mental illness, was not a prolific fiction writer, but she was a remarkably able one. A denizen of the shabby hotels and bars in the Times Square area, she was marvelous at evoking the impermanence and the tarnished beauty of New York, “the most cumbersome, most reckless, most ambitious, most confused, most comical, the saddest and
