Tucked Away: Maeve Brennan's The Visitor

“This was her own room, the room that had been hers since childhood. It was at the back of the house, on the third floor, and its windows overlooked the garden. She stood for a while by the window, and stared down where the garden was. She yielded for a moment to the disappointment that had been spreading coldly over all the homecoming. She tried to grow quiet, leaning against the hard window glass. She thought of her mother, who had been dead only a month, and the glass became hot with her forehead, and she pressed her hands to her face and tried to forget where she was, and that she was alone in her home.”

from Maeve Brennan’s The Visitor

I recently read Maeve Brennan’s The Visitor—an eighty-page novella that was discovered in a university archive after the author’s death—and a book I was patiently saving for a day I could dedicate to reading it. While it was written when Brennan was in her twenties, we can see the beginnings of her writing and her style, and the elements that make her stories so unique and distinct. I first read Brennan’s work back in March and I’m so happy I saved this to read after The Springs of Affection, a collection of her short fiction. In The Visitor, we pick up the subtle details that weave their way into her later works, whether that be the home in Dublin, the laburnum in the back garden that glows in many of her stories, or the detailed descriptions of domestic spaces and the furniture that inhabits them. This novella shows signs of Brennan’s early and careful contemplation of taut dynamics between characters bound by familial or romantic ties that are often damaging and unforgiving—subjects that would later dominate and characterize the author’s short stories. The Visitor is perhaps the only surviving work from Brennan’s early years and acts as a bookend to her short fiction, stories of Dublin, and writing for The New Yorker as the long-winded lady, and as essayist and book reviewer.

The Visitor opens in a train carriage where we meet Anastasia King, who is returning to Dublin for the first time in six years. Her return is prompted by the death of her mother, who she had been staying with and caring for in Paris after having fled an unhappy marriage to Anastasia’s father. Now twenty-two, Anastasia returns to her old house, which is still home to her grandmother and the housekeeper, Katherine. As Anastasia spends more time in Dublin, we start to piece together the family’s past through vignettes of her childhood, and we learn of the choices she once made that now haunt her—the homecoming she had envisioned begins to crumble as she realizes just how unwelcome she is in the home and the city she grew up in.

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While Brennan’s work isn’t very easy to find, The Visitor is available in paperback through New Island Books and may still be found in certain libraries and bookshops—I hope you enjoy this novella, which Nuala O’Faolain called ‘an astonishing miniature masterpiece’!