Maeve Brennan

Author details

Born:
Jan. 6, 1917
Died:
Nov. 1, 1993

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Brennan, Maeve fiction writer and New Yorker columnist, called the ‘Long-Winded Lady’, was born in Dublin on 6 January 1917, second of four children of the nationalist journalist Robert (‘Bob’) Brennan (qv), and his wife, Una (née Anastasia Bolger) both of whom she portrayed in successive stories.

When she was young her father was often on the run from the British, and later from Irish Free State forces.

In late 1921, as the Anglo-Irish Treaty was negotiated in London, the Brennans bought and moved into 48 Cherryfield Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin. This modest terraced house, where they remained until 1934, is the setting for almost half of Brennan’s forty published short stories. ‘The day we got our own back’ (1953), describes an armed raid there in 1922, when Robert was in hiding elsewhere.

In 1934, Taoiseach Éamon de Valera appointed Robert Brennan as secretary of the Irish legation in Washington, DC, and Brennan, who had finished her secondary schooling, moved to the US with her family. She attended Immaculata Seminary in Washington, followed by American University, where she was active in student literary societies and graduated Bachelor of Arts in June 1938. She studied library science at the Catholic University of …

Books by Maeve Brennan