Irish short story writer and journalist at The New Yorker, Maeve Brennan’s novella, The Visitor was only discovered in 2000 in a university archive. Written in 1940, it’s the story of Anastasia King who returns from Paris to become a visitor in her own home. (All the more poignant, when you consider that this vital, intelligent woman, one of Ireland’s greatest short story writers died in obscurity in 1993, homeless and thought to have spent her last days sleeping in the ladies' toilet at the New Yorker offices. As Christopher Carduff said of one of her characters, she was a traveller in residence, a visitor to this life.) The cool reception Anastasia receives from her grandmother augurs the heartless and unstable dynamic that chronicles their relationship throughout the book. Anastasia's loneliness is palpable and a crippling sense of sadness pervades. She's a young woman, orphaned and sans friends looking for support and compassion from the only family she has left, her paternal grandmother. closeness denied, she's cast out at every point, even attending Christmas eve mass alone, and giving presents yet receiving none. Brennan creates a kind of sombre, eerie atmosphere in household life similar to what Argentinan writer, Norah Lange would later do in her amazing novel The People in the Room, 1950. Both novels are concerned with death and isolation, a desire for connection and the claustrophobia inherent in conservative feminine roles.
Fantastic writer.