The Visitor, a previously unpublished novella written in the 1940s, was written by New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan who has already delivered a posthumous one-two with her biting collections The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden.

In Brennan's stories, something quietly horrid has always just happened, or is just about to happen. In The Visitor, it seems to be both. Twenty-two-year-old Anastasia King returns to Dublin after living with her mother in Paris for the past six years. The two left behind Anastasia's father and his fierce old mother. It is to this scary granny Anastasia returns, now that her mother and father have died, but she is met by an implacable rage: Mrs. King has determined not to forgive Anastasia for deserting the family. Brennan sketches in this woman's nastiness in just a few lines. Typically, she writes around her character, rather than tackling her head on: "Mrs. King came into the room in silence. She sat down without speaking, arranging her long black skirt about her long-hidden, unimaginable knees, and examining the tea tray with a critical eye". It is clear that while Anastasia thinks she has come home to stay, she is a mere visitor, and an unwelcome one at that.

Few writers so delicately and cruelly parse their countrymen; Brennan wickedly lays bare the malicious repression of the Irish. Even as she satirises her sanctimonious people, she makes the reader aware that the pain they inflict and feel is real. All this witty psychologising is done with a minimum of characters and plot. The Visitor reads like an Elizabeth Bowen novel without all those words, or like Washington Square with humour. Consequently, The Visitor makes its departure all too quickly. --Claire Dederer

Recently found in a university archive, The Visitor was written in the mid 1940s but was never published. This miraculous literary discovery deepens the ouevre of Maeve Brennan and confirms her status as one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce.

2002-04-27 Eggs are plentiful this year

The Visitor is a diamond, a self-contained brilliance that offers no explanations or excuses but its truths are refracted from its sharp-cut facets : the house, garden, street, park, church, people. The two main characters, grandmother and granddaughter, are themselves facets of the same personality, doing polite, deadly battle for the same ground. This battleground is "home"... Nevertheless it is specifically situated in the severe, joyless architecture which haunts all Dublin writers..., a home where the old woman's son and the young woman's mother suffered the failure of their love, their disintegrating lives reflected in the mirror over the mantle. The dead have no peace however as this failure is carried on to the bitter inconclusive end as the old woman and the equally stubborn young one fail to reconcile their obsessive love for the dead with the charity needed for the living.
Though in an obvious way Maeve Brennan adds her voice to those of Joyce and Beckett in her depiction of a certain Dublin in time, the story has resonance with the Latino gothic of Carlos Fuentes's Aura in its sense of haunting which could as easily flip over into the madness of a ghost story. It also shows she had a troubling prescience of her own end. Did she already foresee herself as the mad woman in the park, shouting abuse, for ever looking through the window at a lost childhood?