[In the following review of The Rose Garden, Osborne praises Brennan's skill at dissecting the complex emotions of her characters.]

Reading Maeve Brennan (1916-1993) is like watching a master jeweler construct a ticking watch from an array of tiny, inanimate parts—her exquisite skill in piecing together the emotional landscape of her characters is evident in every line of The Rose Garden. The 20 stories in this collection—almost all of them appeared in The New Yorker during the 1950's and '60's, and six are in book form here for the first time—expose the vulnerabilities of social-climbing housewives, Dubliners consumed by insecurities or angry longings, lonely or simply solitary New Yorkers and Irish servants who raise spite and malice to a high art. Several stories are set in Herbert's Retreat, a wealthy enclave 30 miles north of Manhattan that Brennan savages with scathing wit, invariably turning the tables on its pretentious, competitive inhabitants. In “The Anachronism,” for example, an ambitious woman who marries into money tries to outdo her snobbish neighbors by hiring the perfect English maid, only to have the maid join forces against her with the woman's vengeful mother. In “The Joker,” a patronizing hostess who invites singles and lost souls to Christmas dinner is appalled when her guests express sympathy for her. Brennan has an almost preternatural understanding of human weakness—the loquacious restaurant patron in “A Snowy Night on West Forty-ninth Street” is, when not the center of attention, “morose and dignified, as though humiliation had taken him unawares but had not found him unprepared.” Brennan can be cruel when skewering her characters, particularly those who engage in petty tyrannies, but she has a shrewd eye and a sense of justice that is also capable of compassion.