Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan - rerun

Backlisted

Backlisted Podcast

Arts, Books, Leisure, Hobbies

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 75 minutes

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Summary

There can be few writers more deserving of Backlisted’s attention than the Irish writer, Maeve Brennan. An adopted New Yorker, Brennan died there in 1993 and was by that time so thoroughly forgotten in her native land, that she received no obituaries in any Irish papers. We are joined by the writers Sinéad Gleason and David Hayden to discuss her collection, The Springs of Affection – subtitled ‘stories of Dublin’ – which was first published posthumously by Houghton Mifflin in 1997, although all but one of these first appeared in the New Yorker, where Brennan was a staff writer for twenty-seven years. It was the enthusiastic praise from other writers including Alice Munro, Edna O’Brien and Mavis Gallant among others, that helped get The Springs of Affection the kind of international attention that the two collections published in Maeve’s lifetime failed to achieve. Since then, Maeve Brennan’s reputation has grown steadily, and her stories are now regularly and favourably compared to those of Joyce, Chekov and Colette. In Ireland, in particular, she has won the admiration of a new generation of women writers, who in Anne Enright’s phrase, see her as ‘a casualty of old wars not yet won.’ This episode also features Andy revisiting the Linda Nochlin’s classic 1971 essay, Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? while John is impressed by Orlam, P.J. Harvey’s dark and brooding verse novel, written entirely in Dorset dialect. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes and exclusive writing, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's John here.
0:04.4	Hello, it's Andy.
0:05.9	And welcome to one of the archive episodes of Backlisted from the far distant.
0:11.8	Well, it's not that distant past this one, is it, Johnny?
0:14.0	It's 2022 and it is the episode dedicated to the Springs of Affection by Mae Brennan, an Irish writer who spent most of her
0:24.2	working life in America. She was a staff writer for the New Yorker and wrote a very lorded
0:31.7	column on the New Yorker called The Long Winded Lady, although it wasn't signed Maeve Brennan. It was a column that
0:39.2	people loved. And we do, in this podcast that you're about to hear, we're joined by two guests,
0:45.6	the novelist and memoirist, Chenet Gleeson, author of Constellations and Hagtstone, and David Hayden, who is fated as a brilliant contemporary short story writer.
0:59.0	Both of them, huge mapeerun fans.
1:01.1	We talk about the springs of affection,
1:02.7	but we also do talk about the columns as well,
1:04.5	the nonfiction columns as well.
1:06.4	And you get to hear Andy talking about very influential essay by Linda Notchlin from the 1970s, I think.
1:14.2	I believe so, yes.
1:15.9	Called Why There No Women Artists.
1:17.8	And I do my best dorset accent to extol the virtues of the little regarded at the time novel by P.J PJ Harvey, the great Polly Harvey, called
1:30.2	Orlam, a novel that I had completely forgotten until I relisten to the episode.
1:35.9	It's narrated by a lamb's eyeball.
1:39.2	Well, there, these aren't spoilers.
1:42.3	These are incentives to keep listening. I don't remember anything
1:47.7	about most of what John said. And that's good because if I did have, as we know, if we could
	...

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