[In the following review of The Visitor, Porter sees some foreshadowing of themes and characterizations that would pervade Brennan's later work.]

The short stories of Maeve Brennan (1916-1993), a Dublin-born staff writer at The New Yorker for almost 30 years, are populated by quietly suffering men and women who are surprised to find themselves trapped in unfulfilled lives, clinging to memories of better days. In this previously unpublished novella [The Visitor], written early in Brennan's career and recently discovered in a university archive, the desperation isn't quiet at all. Anastasia King, a troubled 22-year-old, travels to her childhood home in Dublin from Paris, where she and her mother lived after her mother fled a miserable marriage to her father, who in turn died of heartbreak. When her mother dies too, Anastasia returns with no apparent prospects and no other plan than to re-establish a connection with her only remaining relative, her father's mother. But this icy grandmother has never forgiven Anastasia or her mother, and so tolerates a brief visit while rejecting her granddaughter's request to stay for good. A longtime family maid and a friend of her mother's are Anastasia's only allies in her attempt to win over the old woman, but as the months go by her grandmother hardens her heart and Anastasia slowly falls apart. Weak characterization and a creaky plot slightly hamper Brennan's unsentimental but sympathetic portrayal of Anastasia's predicament, but The Visitor is a fascinating glimpse at a writer developing themes and tonalities that would surface in subtler yet more powerful forms in her later and better work.