As a journalist and playwright, he continued to uphold the Republican cause, working for Sinn Fèin as a leading propagandist.
Maeve never forgot the blazing searchlights accompanying home raids by the Black and Tans, nor the noise of armoured cars.
Bob Brennan went on to serve the new state. In 1934, his hero, Eamon de Valera, rewarded him with the post of secretary to the Irish Legation in Washington, D.C. This is what takes Maeve to America at the age of 17. She finishes her education in Washington but then moves to New York.
After a brief stint as a copy-editor at Harper's Bazaar, she joins the New Yorker, at the invitation of its managing editor, William Shawn.
She becomes glamorous and brittle. She drinks with a gang of literary celebrities and develops, as one commentator said, 'a tongue that could chop a hedge'.
She also contributed gently humorous, gossipy stories to the Talk Of The Town section with which the magazine begins. Its contributors are always anonymous, but Brennan established a particular persona for herself by ascribing these stories to 'a rather long-winded lady we hear from occasionally'.
There were brief affairs; and a disastrous marriage to an alcoholic playwright which lasted five years. But she mostly lived alone, and, after her divorce, became nomadic, moving restlessly in and out of rented apartments and hotels.
At one time, she took up residence in a cubicle behind the ladies toilet in the New Yorker. Here, a couch had been installed in the liberal 1960s, for women employees suffering period pains.
When she emerged from this cubicle it was often to abuse other members of staff. Her biographer finds evidence of Brennan's mental illness in her appearance; her hair became increasingly dishevelled, her lipstick a blatant mess.
By now she was drowning in debts, some of which the New Yorker paid. She became paranoiac and finally broke down. She smashed several glass doors in the office and had to be hospitalised.
No biographer, however skilful, can fully explain a life. But it is possible that Brennan's mental decline is in some way linked with her writing. The calmness of her beautifully achieved prose is disturbing, for beneath it lies a great deal of anger.
It is as if this woman always carried within her small person the violence, as well as the beauty, of Ireland.
