Before she came to The New Yorker she wrote copy for Harper’s Bazaar. She was hired by William Shawn, The New Yorker’s managing editor (and editor in chief after Harold Ross died), to write about women’s fashions. She then moved on to doing short notices of novels and whodunits and an occasional lead review. The unsigned fashion and book notes are untraceable at this point. The lead reviews are so original and well done that they raise the question, Why wasn’t she asked to do more? The answer perhaps is that W. H. Auden was also reviewing books for The New Yorker during this period.

For a while her office was next to mine, on the twentieth floor of 25 West Forty-third Street. I was aware of the quick sound of her heels and her beautiful Dublin accent before I caught a glimpse of her disappearing down the hall. She was in her early thirties and wore her hair in a ponytail, which made her look younger than she was.

I think we became friends because we both liked Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Turgenev’s The Sportsman’s Notebook and the novels and music-hall reminiscences of Colette. A story she submitted, about a Lady Bountiful rather too pleased with the idea of her own kindness toward the unfortunate, was taken, and for the next twenty-one years her fiction passed through my hands on its way to Mr. Shawn or the printer.

She would wander into my office, sit down, and say thoughtfully, “Time magazine is all a dream.” Or talk about Oliver Goldsmith, whom she was so fond of it was almost as if she had known him. She used as a kind of talisman a sentence of his: “Innocently to amuse the imagination in this dream of life is wisdom.”

She had a large framed photograph by Louise Dahl-Wolfe of Colette in old age, looking as if nothing in the way of human behavior, no matter how odd or perverse, would surprise her. One morning when I walked into my office it was hanging on the wall above my desk. It remained there for a month or so and then it was gone. I knew I had said or done something Maeve didn’t approve of. After a short while the picture was back. It came and went, like a cloud shadow. I never knew why and thought it would be a poor idea to ask. The only bone of contention between us I was aware of was that she refused to read the novels of Elizabeth Bowen because Bowen was Anglo-Irish. On the other hand, she venerated Yeats, who was also Anglo-Irish, and she knew a good deal of his poetry by heart.