{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.035839775122979624, 'fraction_numerical': 0.012649332396345749, 'mean_word_length': 4.393939393939394, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“No Place Is Home—It Is as It Should Be”: Exile in the Writing of Maeve Brennan

In the essay “A Daydream” (1976), set during a stiflingly hot summer day in New York City, Maeve Brennan describes surfacing from a dream of East Hampton only to find herself in one of the urban rooms she then called home. She writes: “So much for my daydream of sand and sea and roses. The daydream was, after all, only a mild attack of homesickness. The reason it was a mild attack instead of a fierce one is that there are a number of places I am homesick for. East Hampton is only one of them” (Long-Winded Lady 265). Brennan evokes a similar scene in “Faraway Places Near Here” (1962), a republished sketch in The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker (1969): “When the summer weather in New York begins to reach its height, I am subject to powerful gusts of memory from other summers and other rooms in the different places in the city where I used to live” (112). In this instance the diagnosis of “homesickness” is inflected with particular meaning for the Irish writer far from home. This essay explores the importance of Brennan’s engagement with the theme of exile in her short stories and Long-Winded Lady essays for the New Yorker. Exile carries significant ballast in writing by and about the Irish, and it particularly preoccupies the country’s writers; Brennan’s work reveals a self-reflexive engagement with such a cul-