The Visitor

From celebrated Irish writer Maeve Brennan, The New Yorker’s “Long-Winded Lady,” comes The Visitor—the earliest of all of her known writings—that tells the haunting story of a young woman who returns to her grandmother's home only to face the painful consequences of long-buried family secrets

Anastasia King returns to her grandmother's house in Dublin—the very house where she grew up—after six long years away. She has been in Paris, comforting her disgraced and dying mother, the runaway from a disastrous marriage to Anastasia's late father, her grandmother's only son.

“It's a pity she sent for you,” the grandmother says, smiling with anger. “And a pity you went after her. It broke your father's heart.” Anastasia pays dearly for the choice she made, a choice that now costs her her own strong sense of family and makes her an exile—a visitor—in the place she once called home.

Found unexpectedly in a university archive, this previously unpublished novella from the 1940s is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper. With its sharp exploration of emotional exile and familial resentment, The Visitor deepens Brennan’s legacy as a master of psychological tension and quiet, devastating drama.
"Grim and measured, sure of its emotional power, this is certainly evidence of Brennan’s great gift." —Kirkus Reviews

The Visitor “is the ideal place for one to begin with [Brennan’s] work, for not only does it show where she set out from but it also explores so much of her later fictional world in small compass. The completeness of vision of The Visitor, and the ease with which the novella takes its place among her finest stories, is astonishing. This ferocious tale of love longed for, of love perverted and denied, is one of her finest achievements.” —The Irish Times
MAEVE BRENNAN left Ireland for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. In 1949, she joined the staff of The New Yorker, to which she contributed reviews, essays, and short stories. Her acclaimed works The Rose Garden, The Visitor, and The Springs of Affection are also available from Counterpoint. Maeve Brennan died in 1993 at the age of seventy–six.