Wit, Style and Tragedy: An Irish Writer in New York

Maeve Brennan

The first book about Maeve Brennan, the recently rediscovered New Yorker writer from Ireland, who wrote like an angel, and looked like a fashion model, but became homeless in Manhattan in the 1970s and died forgotten in 1993.

'A biography to savour and treasure. Angela Bourke is as expert on Irish history as she is on the cultural ambience of the male-dominated New Yorker. Her book has wit, sensitivity and insight; everything that Brennan, herself, would have approved of.'

'Hugely entertaining and thought-provoking, and upsetting and funny, and tender and wise.'

'A labour of love and a profound study of literary life in 20th-century America.'

'This book needed to be written and Angela Bourke was the perfect author...meticulously researched, detailed and beautifully written.'

'Bourke merges beautifully the small milestones in the young Maeve's life with the large public events that were going around her...She deftly builds up a tapestry-like texture of Maeve Brennan's young life, which the author herself so successfully mined in her fiction.'

'Bourke has done us all a tremendous service in writing this book.Not least because it compels one to rush immediately to read Brennan's work.Bourke is a meticulous and thorough researcher.'

Angela Bourke is the author of The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (winner of several awards, including the Irish Times Literature Prize for Irish Non-Fiction), and By Salt Water. Born in Dublin, where she still lives, she has spent long periods in the USA, and has held visiting academic positions at Harvard University, Boston College and the University of Minnesota. A leading scholar in interdisciplinary Irish Studies, Angela Bourke writes in Irish and English, and makes frequent appearances on television and radio. She is Senior Lecturer in Irish at University College Dublin, The National University of Ireland, Dublin.

Born in Dublin in 1917 to politically active parents, Maeve Brennan's childhood in Ireland was moulded by the cultural ideologies of nationalism and lit by the creative energy of the Abbey and Gate theatres. She was seventeen when her father was appointed to the Irish Legation in Washington DC, where he was Irish Minister throughout World War II. Maeve wrote fashion copy at Harper's Bazaar until 1949, when William Shawn invited her to join The New Yorker. Tiny, impeccably groomed, and devastatingly witty, in William Maxwell's words, 'to be around her was to see style being invented'. Her richly textured fiction criticism and 'Talk of the Town' pieces, published in the 1950s and '60s, during The New Yorker's most influential period, offer unsparing portraits of the Ireland she had left and the America she inhabited. As this richly researched and wide-ranging book makes clear, Maeve Brennan's effect on the people who met her, her eye for human behaviour, clothing and domestic settings, her memory of home and her courageous life as a woman alone in metropolitan America make her an icon of the twentieth century.

Angela Bourke

Fascinating... passionate and thought-provoking... a creative, stimulating book that deserves to win many readers

One of those rare books that becomes an instantaneous classic

Scrupulous, clear micro-history at its best

Angela Bourke's fascinating, disturbing and powerful book tells a compelling and tragic story

The story of Bridget Cleary's death is a parable for a changing world, a well-researched and horrifying account of what could happen in the region where myth and modernity collide...As dramatic a murder mystery as any devotee of the genre could long for...And it is the rich abundance of ideas that makes this a uniquely important historical work

Exemplary in its restraint, scrupulousness and empathy, it is also beautifully written

'A sad but spellbinding story, told with artistic tact and a humane concern for all caught up in the terrible event. The Burning of Bridget Cleary draws on oral tradition, reportage, popular culture and high literature to show how the past may persist in the present

The story of the killing of Bridget Cleary is so brilliantly researched and narrated that it becomes a parable of the cultural and political relationship between Ireland and Britain at the end of the last century... A classic account

A True Story

In 1895 twenty-six-year-old Bridget Cleary disappeared from her house in rural Tipperary. At first, some said that the fairies had taken her into their stronghold in a nearby hill, from where she would emerge, riding a white horse. But then her badly burned body was found in a shallow grave. Her husband, father, aunt and four cousins were arrested and charged, while newspapers in nearby Clonmel, and then in Dublin, Cork, London and further afield attempted to make sense of what had happened. 
 
In this lurid and fascinating episode, set in the last decade of the nineteenth century, we witness the collision of town and country, of storytelling and science, of old and new. The torture and burning of Bridget Cleary caused a sensation in 1895 which continues to reverberate more than a hundred years later. 
 
Winner of the Irish Times Prize for Non-Fiction

Angela Bourke

Praise for The Burning Of Bridget Cleary

Fascinating... passionate and thought-provoking... a creative, stimulating book that deserves to win many readers

One of those rare books that becomes an instantaneous classic

Scrupulous, clear micro-history at its best

Fascinating... passionate and thought-provoking... a creative, stimulating book that deserves to win many readers

One of those rare books that becomes an instantaneous classic

Scrupulous, clear micro-history at its best

Fascinating... passionate and thought-provoking... a creative, stimulating book that deserves to win many readers

One of those rare books that becomes an instantaneous classic

Scrupulous, clear micro-history at its best

Books by Angela Bourke

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