Ten contemporary Irish writers on Maeve Brennan, the Dubliner who found a home at The New Yorker

Kate Phelan

Maeve Brennan was an Irish writer, who moved from Ireland to the US in 1934 and went on to write sketches, short stories and essays for The New Yorker. By the 1950s and 1960s she was well known in America, but largely unknown at home, even though so many of her stories were set in Dublin.

In a letter to her editor at the magazine, Brennan once wrote of her mother: “She gave me an ‘asylum for my affections’ and I learned that my affections so far exceeded her ability to understand me that she came near to drowning.”

That phrase forms the basis for a new anthology, An Asylum for My Affections: Sketches of Maeve Brennan, in which 10 contemporary Irish writers take up the different meanings of “asylum”.

That word can mean an institution, a place of confinement, a refuge and a shelter. The writers’ essays range across cities and girlhood, myth and folklore, loneliness and transience, history and the diaspora, and in some cases the writers’ own family links to Brennan. Contributors include Roddy Doyle, Sinéad Gleeson, Darran Anderson, Niamh Campbell and Jess Traynor.

The book is nominated for Best Irish-Published Book, a category sponsored by The Journal, at the An Post Irish Book Awards. In this extract, writer Kate Phelan, a PhD student in Creative Writing at Maynooth University, describes opening the first box of Brennan’s papers in an archive in Atlanta… 

THE HOUSE I grew up in was filled with things that belonged to men who didn’t live there. My mother lined the walls of our square hall with cheap flatpack bookshelves to hold her father’s vast collection of hardback books, their spines tightly packed.

By the time I started pulling them down to use as props in my childhood games, he’d been dead for more than 30 years, and the books didn’t seem to have been opened in as long.

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They were dusty and mouldering in our damp seaside cottage. As my familial curiosity deepened, I found myself tugging a single book out from its resting place one day and laying it in my lap with newfound care.

When I cracked open its faded cover, that particular smell lifted from inside – aged paper and disintegrating glue, ink in various stages of decomposition.

A senior executive for the Guinness company by trade, my maternal grandfather, Patrick MacDonogh, had been a poet and an artist in his heart. His own slim poetry collections sheltered amongst his salvaged library, and the uneven plaster walls of our cottage were covered with his watercolour paintings in gentle shades of green and brown: a Parisian square in the early morning; a dark-haired woman lying on a sofa, her stockinged feet up on the backrest; an empty field in Kinsealy, where he liked to walk.

Each painting bore his modest, curling signature in a bottom corner of the frame, but encountering my grandfather’s handwriting for the first time inside one of his books, in the form of the tiny, practised notes he left for himself as he read, felt shocking and private.

As I searched for more, feeling the threatened collapse of the book’s fragile spine with every turned page, my fascination felt heady and wrong, like disturbing a grave.

Encountering Maeve Brennan

Three decades later, a similarly intoxicating rush of wrongness filled my chest as I opened the lid of the first box of Maeve Brennan’s collected papers at the Stuart Rose Library in Atlanta.

A PhD student on day one of my first research trip, jet-lagged and emotional, I had made my way to the library at the appointed time on a humid May morning, checking in on the air-conditioned tenth floor and washing my sweaty hands as instructed. 

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After depositing everything in my possession other than my phone into a narrow locker, I was buzzed through a locked glass door into the almost-empty reading room, where I choose a workspace with a view of treetops. When I gave my name to the tired-looking student working the desk, she promptly disappeared into a side room, emerging moments later carrying a tall, grey box.

She handed it to me with a weak smile and only a few polite instructions – ‘Only take one folder out at a time, ask for a foam support if an item has a spine.’ Back at my desk, my heart beat faster. Officially, I had all the correct permissions to be here, touching this box. How I used the materials inside was governed by the rules of academia and copyright law, but no explicit ethical standard forbade me from lifting its levered lid and reaching into its hidden guts.

What I hadn’t prepared for was the sharp tang of shame underlying the taste of my breathless excitement as I did so, wresting out the first beige cardboard folder and laying it on the desk before me for inspection.

The file contained just one item: a tiny, leather-bound address book, gold lettering printed across its steel blue cover. Roughly the size of my palm, it looked lost in the folder by itself. The upper right corner of the cover appeared to have been chewed off by a dog.

When I eventually worked up the courage to open it, my breath caught at the sight of Maeve’s full name and the old address of her former employer, The New Yorker magazine, pencilled inside in her own hand. The penmanship was legible but appeared rushed.

I pictured her hurriedly writing it as she prepared to rise from her desk, in need of fresh coffee, a cigarette and a brisk walk down West 43rd Street. Next to the address tab with the letter L, there was a faint fingerprint smudge in red lipstick.

An Asylum for My Affections – Sketches of Maeve Brennan is nominated for Best Irish-Published Book, a category sponsored by The Journal in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2026.