[In the following review of The Springs of Affection, Parini states that Brennan's narrowly focused fiction is realistic and simple, yet stylistically elegant.]

Maeve Brennan moved from Ireland to the United States at the age of 17 and eventually became a staff writer at The New Yorker, publishing sketches and stories, book reviews and notes on fashion in the 1950's and 60's. She was also responsible for the “Talk of the Town” items billed as “communications from our friend the long-winded lady.” When Brennan died in 1993, after years of mental illness, her work had slipped from view. But now The Springs of Affection, introduced in suitably affectionate manner by her editor, William Maxwell, remedies that situation, bringing back into print stories from two collections that have long been unavailable.

Brennan's fictional turf here is a narrow one, occupying those side streets in which Dubliners with more pride than money live in rows of modest red-brick houses. As we learn from the seven autobiographical stories that make up the first section, Brennan herself grew up in just such a place. “Our street was called an avenue, because it was blind at one end, the farthest end from us,” her narrator says, echoing the opening of “Araby” from Joyce's “Dubliners.”

But while Joyce ranges widely around his native city, Brennan stays close to a Dublin neighborhood called Ranelagh. And both the strength and weakness of these stories derive from this insularity, this obsessive retracing of familiar boundaries. Like a tongue returning to a broken tooth, Brennan's imagination flicks back compulsively to the same place, reliving the little hurts, the faint joys, the unrealized dreams sealed away in its seemingly identical houses.

Luckily, Brennan does more than merely transcribe memories. Only the first cluster of stories is explicitly autobiographical, and even here one assumes she felt free to invent details and shape reality—although only two of these early stories, “The Old Man of the Sea” and “The Devil in Us,” rise to the level of her best work.

The former opens with “an ancient man selling apples” at the young narrator's front door. “His hair was thin and white. His back was stooped, his expression was vague and humble, and he held his hat in one of his hands.” The mother in the story is charitable to a fault, buying two dozen apples she doesn't really need. Her brother warns her that now the old man will return every week, but she is unconvinced. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” she scolds him, “always thinking the worst of everybody.” Alas, the old man comes back, and each visit presents an exquisitely played out moral quandary.

“The Devil in Us” is one of Brennan's rare stories that ventures beyond Ranelagh. Its narrator, a boarding student at a convent school in County Kildare, is singled out by a perverse nun as a girl whose “sheer stubbornness” is a sign of the Devil at work. Brennan eloquently describes the fierce moralism of a school where any degree of nonconformity is cruelly checked, making her heroine's plight seem as real as it is frightening.

The second cluster, of six stories, features the dismal marriage of Hubert and Rose Derdon. He works in a men's clothing store while she minds the house—a house in Ranelagh much like the one we have already come to know. A repressed man who can hardly bear to have his routines disturbed, Hubert is upset in “A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances” by the fact that Rose is going to Mass on a weekday to commemorate her father's death, a yearly ritual. “He didn't like to have his breakfast all topsy-turvy,” Brennan writes, “and he didn't like seeing his wife running around the house at that early hour of a weekday morning with her hat and her gloves on, and her big bulging prayer book in her hand.” Hubert especially dislikes the affectations his wife puts on when she goes out. He finds “her pretensions, the pitiful air she wore of being a certain sort of person,” intensely irritating. He also blames Rose for ruining their only child, John, who became a priest to escape her and spite him.

Hubert and Rose's claustrophobic, dysfunctional marriage is dissected layer by layer in the stories that follow. It soon becomes clear that Rose “was afraid of him, and that was the whole of the difficulty, and that is what defeated him at every turn.” This terror turns inward and festers, suggested in all manner of passive aggressions. Brennan is nothing less than brilliant in dramatizing scenes in which nothing obvious is happening, but in which marriages succeed or fail. In “Family Walls,” for example, Hubert merely glimpses Rose shutting the kitchen door as he enters the house and suddenly understands that barriers are erected against him everywhere, both literally and figuratively.

In the final Derdon story, “The Drowned Man,” Rose has died and Hubert's sister has come to look after him; painfully, Hubert is forced to pretend that grief overwhelms him. In a moment of eerie clarity, he realizes that it “was not Rose's fault that he had been mistaken in her. She had shone at a distance, but close to she had ceased to shine. Still, she was gone, she had been good, and he wished he could miss her.”

The eight stories in the final section circle around the marriage of Delia and Martin Bagot. They also live in Ranelagh in a red-brick house—with two daughters, Margaret and Lily. Everything seems in place for the Bagots' happiness, but Brennan is unwilling to let such a thing occur. Her couples are invariably ill suited to marriage; thus, Martin is a loner who cannot accept his wife's domesticity. In “The Twelfth Wedding Anniversary,” he becomes upset when Delia puts flowers in the little room where he sleeps apart from her each night; perversely, “it was her care for him that was driving him to despair—the ceaseless care that he understood, and could not return, and did not want, and could not avoid.”

In the magnificent title story, the Bagot marriage is reimagined by Martin's twin sister, Min, after his passing. She had come to Dublin from Wexford, a country town, to look after him after his wife's death and now he is dead too. She is triumphant, the last survivor: Min, “standing alone as always, had lived to sum them all up,” and she does so with a vengeance.

Like this wide-ranging, savage, poignant story, Maeve Brennan's book is full of small miracles presented in elegant but simple prose. The Springs of Affection should bring her back to the table of modern fiction, where her place has been empty for too long.