'And at last Min was released from the duty she had imposed on herself, to remain with him as long as he needed her.' In the stories that compose this collection, Maeve Brennan turns her anatomist's eye to the ugly feelings that teem just beneath the surface of family life - doing so, however, with an attention to detail that makes these unsparing portraits luminous and exquisite. Brennan's subjects are ordinary people worn down by life, by its disappointments, its little humiliations. Yet they are also dreamers, defiantly hopeful of one day overstepping the narrow confines of the situations in which, unaccountably, they find themselves. These are stories that ache; pitting imagination against circumstance, they are at once claustrophobic and expansive, heartbreaking and miraculous. With a new introduction by acclaimed novelist Claire-Louise Bennett, The Springs of Affection reveals Maeve Brennan to be one of the 20th century's most innovative and important writers.