Choreographies of Place: Gender and the Negotiation of Urban and suburban landscapes in Maeve Brennan's fiction

Throughout the growing body of critical literature engaging with the work of Maeve Brennan (1917-1993), the interior spaces of the home have been the subject of considerable attention and analysis. In her study of Irish women writers and the modern short story, Elke D'Hoker has written that, for Brennan, 'the family home stands out as both a common setting and a dominant poetic image'.1 In her nuanced biography of the author, Angela Bourke has paid close attention to the place of the family home in Brennan's personal history, as well as its role as a model for many of the domestic spaces depicted in The Springs of Affection: Stories of Dublin (first published as a collection in 1997).2 The Vibrant House: Irish Writing and Domestic Space also includes a detailed essay by Bourke on the role of the family house and domestic space within Brennan's Dublin short stories.3 Ellen McWilliams characterizes Brennan's Dublin short stories as being 'interested largely in domestic interiors and the intimacies of family life in a suburban Dublin household', and positions New York as the centre of Brennan's mapping of urban environments.4 The themes of homelessness, exile, and the trauma of lacking a home have also been at the centre of critical exploration of Brennan's work. In her reading of The Visitor (2000), Brennan's posthumously published novella, Abigail L. Palko focuses on the sense of exile experienced by Anastasia King, the central character, as she moves from Paris back to her grandmother's house in Dublin, and finds herself an unwelcome guest.5 The themes of exile and displacement are also explored in relation to Brennan's work by McWilliams, who considers nomadism and rootlessness as a space of creative resistance and possibility.