SOURCE: Porter, Michael. Review of The Visitor. New York Times Book Review (26 November 2000): 21.

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 In this previously unpublished novella [The Visitor], written early in Brennan's career and recently discovered in a university archive, the desperation isn't quiet at all.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...