The visitor - maeve brennan

The current revival of the work of Maeve Brennan, who died in obscurity in 1993, has won her a reputation as a twentieth-century classic--one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce.

Now, unexpectedly, Brennans oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened by a miraculous literary discovery--a short novel written in the mid-1940s, but till now unknown and unpublished.

Recently found in a university archive, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper.

The Visitor is the haunting tale of Anastasia King, who, at the age of twenty-two, returns to her grandmothers house--the very house where she grew up--after six long years away.

She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, the runaway from a disastrous marriage to Anastasias late father, the grandmothers only son.

Its a pity she sent for you.

the grandmother says, smiling with anger.

And a pity you went after her.

It broke your fathers heart.

Anastasia pays dearly for the choice she made, a choice that now costs her her own strong sense of family and makes her an exile--a visitor--in the place she once called home.

Penelope Fitzgerald, writing of Brennans story The Springs of Affection, said that it carries an electric charge of resentment and quiet satisfaction in revenge that chills you right through.

The same can be said of the The Visitor , Maeve Brennans lost novel--the early work of an incomparable master.