A devastating collection of stories from one of the twentieth century’s finest writers

In the stories that compose this collection, Maeve Brennan writes about the daily lives of three Dublin families. Brennan turns her anatomist’s eye to the resentment, rivalry, and hatred that teem beneath the surface of family life – always doing so, however, with an attention to detail that makes these unsparing stories luminous and exquisite.

Brennan’s subjects are ordinary people worn down by life, its little humiliations; yet they are also dreamers, defiantly hopeful of one day stepping beyond the narrow confines of the situation in which, unaccountably, they have found themselves. These stories ache; pitting imagination against circumstance, they are at once claustrophobic and expansive.

With a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Claire-Louise Bennett, The Springs of Affection reveals Maeve Brennan to be one of the most innovative and important writers of the 20th century.

Maeve Brennan (1917 – 1993) was an Irish short story writer and journalist. She moved to the United States in 1934 when her father was assigned by the Department of Foreign Affairs to the Irish Legation in Washington, D.C. Brennan wrote for The New Yorker as a social diarist. She wrote sketches about New York life under the pseudonym "The Long-Winded Lady". She also contributed fiction criticism, fashion notes, and essays.

Peninsula Press, 2023, 368 pages.