On the Irishwoman who "put New York back in the New Yorker..." For Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1, listen to The Long-Winded Irish Lady, by Lourdes Mackey above.
In the 1950s, the New Yorker magazine began to feature a regular chronicle of city life by a contributor known only as The Long Winded Lady. This writer's whimsical, sardonic, sketches about nothing very much led the 'Talk of the Town’ column in the magazine, on subjects like The man who combed his Hair – or XX . According to John Updike, the Long Winded Lady ‘put New York back in The New Yorker.’
It came as a surprise to some readers when, in publishing a collection of her pieces in 1969, the Long-Winded Lady revealed herself to be Maeve Brennan, an Irish immigrant who’d only arrived in New York in her mid-twenties....
A new edition of the Long Winded Lady pieces by Maeve Brennan, with an introduction by Sinead Gleeson, has just been published by Peninsula Press.
