Another troubled yet fascinating female writer

An extraordinary writer, a troublemaker, a tragic storyteller: a shame she was almost forgotten. But there is always hope in “almost,” because her short stories, her own variations of Weird fiction, have recirculated.

Brennan died in 1993 in New York. In the last years of her life she occupied a box room beside the woman’s lavatory at The New Yorker offices and was frequently admitted to a series of mental hospitals. She had been married, but only briefly, to the magazine’s managing editor, St Clair McKelway. They split amicably in 1959 when Brennan was 42. She never remarried and she didn’t have children. After divorcing McKelway, Brennan resided in a succession of well-appointed hotels and rented apartments. She also spent long periods in the country. According to editor Gardner Botsford she could “transport her entire household, all her possessions, and her cats – in a taxi”. In one Manhattan apartment she went to the considerable expense of installing parquet flooring, but decamped to the Algonquin Hotel, leaving the flat vacant until the lease ran out.

The details pertaining to the final chapter of Maeve Brennan’s life are typically related in tones that convey regret and pity. The beautiful smart Manhattanite who wandered alone, who observed a city that she could never quite settle in, who died with too much lipstick on in the back rooms of the magazine where she reigned supreme for many years, and so on. I don’t suppose it was the most decorous way to go. But so what? So what that she didn’t settle down? So what that she went crazy? Brennan was a brilliant, courageous, hard-working, independent and mysterious woman who was, according to those who knew her best, a great deal of fun. ©