Angela Bourke, Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the 'New Yorker'. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004. 333 pages. GBP 16.99 (hardback). Since her rediscovery less than a decade ago, there has been growing interest in Maeve Brennan. Angela Bourke's intelligent, sensitive, and well-researched book marks a major advance in our understanding of Brennan's importance: we can now begin to understand her as an important figure both in Irish diaspora writing, and in the writing of Ireland itself, in the decades from 1950 when she published her first short story to 1980 when she was already passing into the silence of her last years.
