Biography of Maeve Brennan – Happy in New York (Archive)

She wrote city columns in the style of a flaneur and short stories in which she looked deep into the soul of her characters, where she mostly found loneliness and speechlessness. We are talking about Maeve Brennan (1917-1993), who was born in Ireland but lived most of her life in New York.

With her sparkling intelligence and her beauty, she quickly managed to gain a foothold there among the journalistic and literary avant-garde of the 1950s. She also made a career as a film character, she is considered a role model for Truman Capote’s Holly Golightly, who was played by Audrey Hepburn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

An unusually self-determined life for its time

Brennan didn’t like to talk about her roots in Ireland, and her parents were famous too. Robert and Una Brennan were active in the Irish War of Independence, their father was at the forefront of the 1916 Easter Rising and was the Republic of Ireland’s first envoy to Washington.

“She wanted to be considered an American,” says Brennan’s German biographer Michaela Karl. Although Maeve Brennan died lonely and mentally confused in New York, she led a happy and for her time unusually self-determined life. Michaela Karl says goodbye to the common image of the unhappy exile and sets a new accent in the reception of this idiosyncratic auor.

Michaela Karl: “I would never read something like this without lipstick.”
Maeve Brennan. A biography
Verlag Hoffmann & Campe, Hamburg
352 pages, 22 euros

Maeve Brennan: “The Complete Tales: New York Stories and Dublin Stories”
Translated from the English by Hans Christian Oeser.
Steidl Verlag, Göttingen
Volume 1,592 pages; Volume 2 576 pages 45.00 euros

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