Maeve Brennan left Ireland for America in 1934, when she was seventeen. In 1949 she joined the staff of the New Yorker, to which she contributed for more than thirty years. Between 1954 and 1981 she wrote, for 'The Talk of the Town', a series of sketches about life in Manhattan, which she gathered in a book called The Long-Winded Lady. She collected most of her short stories in two volumes, In and Out of Never-Never Land and Christmas Eve; these and further stories were republished posthumously in The Springs of Affection and The Rose Garden. Maeve Brennan died in 1993, at the age of seventy-six. Her lost novel, The Visitor, was published by Atlantic in 2001.
