“No Place Is Home—It Is as It Should Be”: Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan

Abstract

In the essay "A Daydream" (1976), set during a stifling hot summer day in New York City, Maeve Brennan describes surfacing from a dream of East Hampton-only to find herself in one of the urban rooms she then called home. She writes: "So much for my daydream of sand and sea and roses. The daydream was, after all, only a mild attack of homesickness. The reason it was a mild attack instead of a fierce one is that there are a number of places I am homesick for. East Hampton is only one of them" (265). She evokes a similar scene in "Faraway Places Near Here," a republished sketch in The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker: "When the summer weather in New York begins to reach its height, I am subject to powerful gusts of memory from other summers and other rooms in the different places in the city where I used to live" (112). In this instance, the diagnosis of "homesickness" is inflected with particular meaning for the Irish writer far from home.This essay explores the importance of Brennan's engagement with the theme of exile in her short stories and "Long-Winded Lady" essays for The New Yorker. Exile carries significant ballast in writing by and about the Irish and particularly preoccupies the country's writers; Brennan's work evidences a self-reflexive engagement with such a cultural inheritance-as well as signs of an interest in fashioning it anew. The work speaks in revealing ways to her own distinctive position as both a woman writer and as a selfconsciously transatlantic one, an author for whom "gusts of memory" imaginatively tether her work as much to New York as to Dublin. The essay turns to her "Long-Winded Lady" sketches, as offering the most revealing exploration of these questions, but will first provide an overview of Brennan's wider engagement with exile.Brennan's focus on exile finds two different modes of expression. On the one hand, the writing displays a politically aware concern with the history of the Irish migrant-