January 6, 1917

This 1948 picture of New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan, (January 6, 1917 to November 1, 1993), accompanies a LRB article:





'....[In it her] black collar is high, and her eyes look behind ...[the photographer] to a corner of the room; she’s not avoiding the camera so much as making herself opaque to it. (‘To turn away,’ one of her characters says, caught gazing at a lover, ‘would be to admit that she had been turned towards him.’) In New Yorker lore, the platitudes used of her – ‘changeling’, ‘fairy princess’ – point to something fugitive, just as the Dublin stories, on which her reputation as a fiction writer depend, have a preternatural ability to seem intimate while keeping the reader at arm’s length. ...

'Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin....''Her parents had both been involved in the Easter Rising. Her mother, Una, was one of the three women who raised the tricolour in Enniscorthy in April 1916, and one of only two women to be admitted to the Irish Republican Brotherhood. After the Rising was suppressed, Robert, her father, narrowly escaped the firing squad, and was in Lewes Prison when Maeve was born. Her childhood was punctuated by raids from ‘unfriendly men dressed in civilian clothes carrying revolvers; they were looking for her father, ... often on the run. After de Valera came to power in 1932, Robert Brennan became the first Irish emissary to the United States. Maeve was 17 when the family emigrated. In Washington, she took a degree in library science at the Catholic University, and became engaged to the playwright and theatre critic Walter Kerr. He broke her heart. (Years later William Shawn told a colleague that Kerr would never write for the New Yorker ‘because of Maeve’.)

'In 1941, Brennan moved to Manhattan and soon found work at Harper’s Bazaar, where she stayed for seven years, rising through the ranks from a copywriter to an editor. Life profiled her in 1945 as a model of modern flânerie, scouring the boutiques of New York for things to include in her columns. Brennan is pictured window-shopping for ceramics on Madison Avenue, and vacillating over a pair of leather sandals (shoes were rationed because of the war); there’s no hint of the crippling anxiety her new status inspired. ‘All my life,’ she told William Maxwell, her closest friend, ‘I was as ashamed of having a little talent as another would be of being born without a nose.’ ....'

Her talent included loving cats, and she wrote about them. "I see you Bianca" is just one short story title wherein cats are mentioned. And the author's end was sad. Though now she is famous again.