Maeve Brennan and James Joyce

As a New York writer, Maeve Brennan forges a relationship with Ireland as home that speaks to the separation and imaginative return so strongly associated with James Joyce while at the same time putting a careful distance between her work and Joyce's formidable influence. Drawing on archival material at the University of Delaware and the New York Public Library, which amplifies our understanding of some of the intentions and motivations in Brennan's work, this essay examines how Brennan transforms Joycean modes and motifs in her careful mapping and writing of New York in her essays for The New Yorker. Written under the pseudonym "The Long-Winded Lady", Brennan's essays for the magazine break imaginative ground in the city that she lived in for most of her life and expand outwards from the self-contained domestic world of Cherryfield Avenue so central to her Dublin stories. The main concern here is with Brennan's adaptation of Joycean motifs and the different ways in which she positions herself in a direct line of inheritance to Joyce as she negotiates her position as a transatlantic writer in the middle of the twentieth century.