The Visitor
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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Found unexpectedly in a university archive, this previously unpublished novella from the 1940s is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper.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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This previously unpublished novella by the late Brennan (The Rose Garden), a staff writer for the New Yorker for over 30 years, was recently discovered in a university archive. Written in the 1940s, it concerns 22-year-old Anastasia King's return to her paternal grandmother's home in Dublin, where she spent the first 16 quiet years of her life. Anastasia's mother--fragile, emotionally troubled Mary--disgraced herself by running away from her husband, John, and especially his judgmental, domineering mother, and escaping to Paris, "looking for someone she remembered from when she was at school there.... It was just an idea she had." Anastasia followed her mother to France, and, when her father came to bring them back, the teenager refused to leave Mary and return to Dublin. Six years later, Mary has died and Anastasia, now alone, returns to her grandmother's house, expecting to be embraced. Grandmother King's reaction is cold; she soon informs Anastasia that she is welcome for a visit, but that she forfeited her birthright when she chose her unstable mother over her father, who died shortly after he returned from Paris by herself. Housekeeper Katherine attempts to soften Grandmother's steely reserve, and an old family friend, Norah Kilbride, elicits Anastasia's help in a deathbed promise. This early work by the respected writer never flinches from its exploration of the destructive power of family pride and anger. Brennan's restrained but touching evocation of a young woman whose heart has been wrung dry and who thereafter is condemned to permanent exile is permeated with outrage and sorrow.
