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A painful homecoming: The Visitor, by Maeve Brennan, reviewed

Returning to the family house in Dublin after the death of her mother in Paris, 22-year-old Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her embittered grandmother

25 January 2025

9:00 AM

25 January 2025

9:00 AM

The Visitor Maeve Brennan

Peninsula Press, pp.111, 10.99

Maeve Brennan (1917-93) was a supremely gifted Irish/American writer, whose work is periodically rediscovered, only to vanish again. It’s as if her literary reputation (she has been compared with Joyce, Flaubert and Chekhov among others) won’t stay fixed and is as homeless as she herself became.

Arriving home to Dublin, Anastasia expects a warm welcome – only to be steadily spurned by her grandmother

Aged 32, she secured a job at the New Yorker, contributing sardonic observations of city life as well as wry, melancholy short stories, part-fiction, part-memoir.

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