One day I found a quotation from Yeats written in pencil on the plaster wall where I could read it sitting at my desk: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.” In time there were other such statements for my mind to be caught by in moments of abstraction. One of them was “It is dangerous to mock a fool. God.” Even so, she did frequently.

All but one of the stories in this book originally appeared in The New Yorker and then were published in two collections, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974), both long out of print. Her best stories are always set in Ireland and have no characters that are not Irish.

The group of stories that are written in the first person are, I assume, autobiographical since the narrator is called Maeve and the narrator’s brother and sisters have the same names as Maeve’s brother and sisters. They live in a small brick family house on a dead-end street in a suburb of Dublin. It is where she lived as a child and it is her imagination’s home. Also, these stories do not read as if they were fictitious. Though slight, they are definitely stories, written with great care and radiant with the safety and comfort of home. Even when the house is brutally ransacked by plainclothesmen — the father is for the Republic and against the Irish Free State and was at the time on the run — nothing really bad happens. The house is protected by love.

Over a period of fifteen years Maeve published, in “The Talk of the Town,” what were presented as “communications from our friend the long-winded lady.” They were anything but long-winded — two to four printed columns. Half descriptive, half reflective, they are visually as true to nature as the prints of Hokusai. They are always about New York City — about a rainstorm watched through the window of a borrowed apartment, about a man she sometimes sees who is always combing his hair, about a bad-mannered dog, about invisibility, about self-service elevators that creak and carry on as if they were unsafe and frequently stop at the wrong floor, about the light from the sky at a certain time of day, about a part of town where the atmosphere is of shabby transience, about the states of mind of people seen only once or who are imaginary, about a cageful of tiny birds for sale in the basement of a five-and-ten-cent store, about apprehension that has no known cause, about a young man waiting for his date in the bar of what turns out to be the wrong hotel, about what lies behind the curiosity that leads her to turn first to the obituary pages of the morning paper. Forty-seven of these pieces were published as a book under the title of The Long-Winded Lady (1969).