Maeve Brennan: A Place in the Mind

This book explores the intricate interplay between physical spaces and psychological landscapes in the works of Irish-American author Maeve Brennan. Brennan’s writing is now classed amongst the most important of twentieth-century Irish women’s fiction, having undergone a significant reclamation and reappraisal in the 30 years since her death. Single and childfree for most of her life, Brennan eschewed the securities of family and home, experiencing an ＂otherness＂ that she shared with her fellow New Yorkers, many of them left, she wrote, hanging on to a city half-capsized--＂most of them still able to laugh as they cling to the island that is their life’s predicament.＂ It is a suitably ambiguous expression for a writer who cultivated an interstitial existence, whose stories inhere within a dream cycle of reiterative pasts, and whose works augment and elevate the canon of radical Irish fiction.

Edward O’Rourke completed his PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published on the topics of women in urban space, femme theory, and the writer Kate O’Brien. O’Rourke is interested in postcolonial writing, and the occurrence of mania in the diasporic literature produced by women. He currently teaches at Mount Sackville in Dublin.