The Visitor

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 grandmothers home only to face the painful consequences of long-buried family secrets

Anastasia King returns to her grandmothers 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 Anastasias late father, her grandmothers only son.

“Its a pity she sent for you,” the grandmother says, smiling with anger. “And a pity you went after her. It broke your fathers 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Found unexpectedly in a university archive, this previously unpublished novella from the 1940s is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally unreachable side of the Irish temper.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.