The Visitor

8vo. Pp. [vi], 87, [1 (blank)]. Editor's Note. Printed wraps. Front cover blurbs by Claire Messud, Edward Albee and John Updike.

Highly praised novella, written in the mid-1940s and recently discovered at the University of Notre Dame archives. The haunting tale of an Irish lass who returns to Dublin after a six-year absence in Paris, nursing her absconded, dying mother, and ready to face the implacable wrath of her paternal grandmother.

Angela Bourke's 2004 biography of the late author, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker, speculates that Brennan – frequently dressed in black and sporting dark oversized glasses – may have been the inspiration for the character of Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958). The two were employed contemporaneously as staff writers at both Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker. "This previously unpublished novella by the late Maeve Brennan is an astonishing miniature masterpiece. [It] will stay with the reader forever." –Nuala O'Faolain