But she's not there

You can look for her in The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, or the Dictionary of Irish Literature or the Biographical Dictionary of Irish Writers. But she's not there. Nor, to my knowledge, has she featured in any of the tremendous feminist efforts to restore the memories and reputations of forgotten Irish women writers. Yet Maeve Brennan was, in her time, one of the most glamorous and widely-read Irish writers of short prose. And her time is not the far-distant past. She died in 1993.

One of the stories in this superb collection, "Christmas Eve", was written in New York about 50 years ago, but it is a memory of Dublin perhaps 25 years before that. It evokes a mother thinking about her little daughter, Lily. The mother wants to believe in Santa Claus herself so that there might be "someone big and kind outside the house who knew about the children, someone who knew their names and their ages, and that Lily might go out into the world and make something of herself . . . "

As you read on, you get the sense that this desire is motivated by fear - a vague but powerful anxiety about how womens' lives can get lost, how you could start off somewhere and end up somewhere else and have no idea about what kind of journey took you there. "She couldn't see any connection at all between herself as she used to be and herself as she was now . . . "

You don't have to know much about Maeve Brennan's life to feel the poignancy of these lines, and the publisher, Flamingo, has chosen not to tell the reader a great deal. A short biographical note fills in the bare essentials of her biography, but the elegant, affectionate and deeply moving introduction to the American edition by her friend and colleague William Maxwell has been dropped from this edition.

Yet it is worth knowing that "Christmas Eve" is an autobiographical story, a reflection on a real life. "Lily" was the writer herself. And she had gone out into the world and made something of herself. She was, when she wrote it, a writer on one of the smartest magazines in the world, The New Yorker, in which the story, like many of these pieces, was first published.

It is worth knowing something else as well, something painful and deeply sad that emerges gently and shockingly in Maxwell's essay: that Maeve Brennan ended up as a kind of bag lady.

Gradually, as she grew old, she slipped into psychosis and destitution and, until her death five years ago at the age of 76, she more or less lived in the women's toilets in the New Yorker building, "as if", wrote Maxwell, "it were her only home. Nobody did anything about it, and the secretaries nervously accommodated themselves to her sometimes hallucinated behaviour, which could turn violent."

It was a strange end for one of the children of the Irish revolution. Her father, Robert Brennan, was a prominent and militant nationalist. She was born in Dublin while he was away in jail, having had a death sentence for his part in the 1916 Rising commuted to life imprisonment. Her earliest recorded memories, recalled in the funny and gleeful story in this collection "The Day We Got Our Own Back" are of raids by Free State forces on the family home in Ranelagh. When Fianna Fail came to power, her father was appointed the first Irish ambassador to Washington. Maeve, then almost 18, went with him and the rest of the family. When his term of office was up, and her parents and sisters returned to Dublin, she decided to stay on in New York and try to make a life for herself as a writer.

That decision was obviously, in one sense, a free choice. But in another sense, she had no choice at all, for she was two things that it would have been hard to sustain in the Ireland of the 1940s and 1950s - an intellectual woman and a writer. If you read her early autobiographical stories in "The Springs of Affection", you get a good impression of how impossible it would have been to be herself in that Ireland.

In "The Clever One", she recalls that when she was nine she told her sister that when she grew up she was going to be a famous actress: "I'll act in the Abbey Theatre, and I'll be in the pictures." And her sister, two years younger, but wiser to the ways of the Irish world, simply said, "Don't go getting any notions into your head." A phrase, surely, that could have been emblazoned on the Tricolour. "The Devil in Us" is set in the convent boarding school she attended in Kilcullen, Co Kildare. The nuns, she writes, picked on her, and three other girls, for allegedly not singing with sufficient gusto in choir practice: ["]I could hear and feel that I was singing, and I thought my three companions in guilt could hear and feel they were singing, too . . . The worst of it was that once we had been proclaimed black sheep in singing class, our disgrace gradually spread out and discoloured all our school life."

But she could sing with words, and the title story of this collection is as good as the very best of Mary Lavin or Frank O'Connor. "The Springs of Affection" is, perhaps tellingly, about an old woman who has felt trapped inside a life that doesn't belong to her. When her twin brother dies, she leaves the alien suburbs of Dublin and goes home to Wexford. That dream of home may be the greatest of Irish literary cliches, but in Brennan's imagination it is suffused with utter conviction and realised with absolute emotional precision. It is as if the story, and all these stories, were the home she really inhabited.

And yet there is that tragic, haunting phrase of Maxwell's about her ending up occupying the women's toilets at the New Yorker office "as if it were her only home". For in spite of her dazzling success, it is clear that she was at home in neither Ireland nor America. For all her potential greatness as a fiction writer, she could write of nothing but Ireland, a country in which she had no readership. She could be neither an Irish writer nor an American one. Is it so surprising that her wonderful imagination was finally derailed into psychosis?

After her death, William Maxwell came across a mock reply she had written to a reader of the New Yorker who had written to the editors asking them to print more of her stories. Signed in his name, the letter announced her death: "She shot herself in the back with the aid of a small hand-mirror at the foot of the main altar in St. Patrick's Cathedral." The celebrated Frank O'Connor, she wrote, happened to be in the confession box, pretending to be a priest in order to gather material for his stories. He heard the shot and "fearing a scandal, ran up to the front of the church and slipped her in the poor box . . . It took six strong parish priests to get her out of the box . . . We will never know why she did what she did, but we think it was because she was drunk and heartsick. She was a very fine person, a very real person, two feet, hands, everything. But it's too late to do much about that now."