Long-Winded Lady

In these delightful, melancholy prose sketches Maeve Brennan goes in pursuit of the ordinary, taking us on a tour of the cheap hotels, unassuming restaurants, and crowded streets of New York City. Brennan presents herself as the long-winded lady, solitary wanderer and wry observer of the human comedy. Whether she is riding the subway, failing to eat broccoli in a deserted restaurant, or watching lovers quarrel in Washington Square, Brennan manages to capture the wavering spectacle of the metropolis with an uncanny precision that makes these slight essays at once hallucinatory and hyperreal. Originally written for The New Yorker between 1954 and 1981 and presented here in full with a new introduction by Sinéad Gleeson, these pieces reveal Maeve Brennan to be one of the twentieth century’s most accomplished documentarians of city life, and one of its finest essayists.

‘The Long-Winded Lady is anything but. Maeve Brennan has an ear for the quip, for the anecdote that sings; she can lay bare a person’s soul in just a few lines. Her column for the New Yorker served as a scrapbook of her life and times, of the people who lived alongside her in New York City, a record not of the extraordinary, but of the infra-ordinary: this is a collection of “forty-seven moments of recognition,” as she puts it. These essays are striking, fresh, and addictive; once you start seeing the world through Maeve Brennan's eyes, you'll never want to stop.’ Lauren Elkin, author of Art Monsters and Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London; ‘These prodigiously entertaining essays – fleeting but memorable, light, lambent and shadowed – are feats from a lonely eye of watchfulness, wit and perception, of a great city, New York, in the 20th century, that might make sense of all places and times.’ David Hayden, author of Darker with the Lights on

Maeve Brennan was born in Dublin on 6 January 1917 and moved with her family to American in 1934. She later settled in Manhattan and joined the staff of The New Yorker. The long-winded lady columns were initially published anonymously in the magazine. They were first collected in book form in 1969, the same year in which Maeve’s first collection of stories, In and Out of Never-Never Land, was published. The final long-winded lady column appeared in The New Yorker in January 1981.