This previously unpublished novella by the late Maeve Brennan is an astonishing miniature masterpiece. [It] will stay with the reader forever. -Nuala O'Faolain.. Maeve Brennan has been called one of the best Irish writers of stories since Joyce, and with The Visitor her oeuvre is immeasurably deepened and broadened. Written in the mid-1940s, it is a story of Dublin and of the unkind, ungenerous, emotionally distant side of the Irish temper. This haunting novella stands with her greatest short stories.