Those who knew Maeve Brennan described her as stylish or Irish; she went from celebrated New Yorker writer to obscurity in a nursing home. But her short stories, lovely and unbearable, live on

Maeve Brennan didn’t have to be a woman for her work to be forgotten, though it surely helped. She did not have to become a bag lady for her work to be revived, though that possibly helped too. The story of her mental decline is terrifying for anyone who works with words, who searches her clean, sour sentences for some hint or indication of future madness, and then turns to check their own.

Brennan is, for a new generation of female Irish writers, a casualty of old wars not yet won. The prose holds her revived reputation very well, especially the Irish stories. These feel transparently modern, the way that Dubliners by Joyce feels modern. It is partly a question of restraint. Benedict Kiely, Walter Macken, perhaps even Mary Lavin, ran the risk of being “Irish” on the pages of the New Yorker, which is to say endearing. Frank O’Connor was the cutest of the lot, perhaps, as well as the most successful. Brennan remains precise, unyielding: something lovely and unbearable is happening on the page.

Her book was well received but did not make it across the Atlantic. It was a promising start for a career already over

No Irish paper published an obituary when she died, in a home where no one knew her history, not even Brennan herself