Maeve Binchy | Signed First Editions

About Maeve Binchy

Maeve Binchy was born in Dalkey, County Dublin in 1939, the eldest of four children, and grew up in a household that valued warmth and conversation above most other things. She was educated at University College Dublin, where she read history, and then taught Latin and history in Dublin schools before an accidental encounter with journalism changed the course of her life. She had been sending long, vivid letters home to her father from a trip to Israel; he, recognising something in them, passed them to a newspaper. The Irish Independent published them and paid her sixteen pounds. She never went back to teaching.

She joined The Irish Times in 1968 and spent the next decade as a columnist, features writer, and London correspondent, building a reputation for writing about ordinary people with humour, precision, and what those who knew her invariably described as a total absence of malice. She published her first novel, Light a Penny Candle, in 1982, at the age of forty-three. It was an immediate success, and she never looked back.

Her novels are set, almost without exception, in small-town and suburban Ireland, tracing the currents of friendship, love, ambition, and disappointment that run beneath the surface of unremarkable lives. The tone is warm but never sentimental, observant without being cruel. Echoes (1985) and Circle of Friends (1990) cemented her reputation on both sides of the Atlantic. The latter, a story of friendship and romantic entanglement among a group of young women making their way from a small Midlands town to university in Dublin, was adapted for cinema in 1995, starring Minnie Driver and Chris O’Donnell, and introduced Binchy to a global audience that had not found her through the books. Tara Road (1998), in which an Irish and an American woman exchange houses and, in the process, their perspectives on their own lives, became an Oprah’s Book Club selection and her biggest international seller; it was later filmed in 2005. By this point her novels were selling in thirty-seven languages and she had become, by some measures, one of the bestselling Irish writers of the twentieth century.

The awards that came to her tended to be those that recognised a lifetime’s contribution rather than individual books. She received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the British Book Awards in 1999, the Irish PEN Award in 2007, and the Bord Gáis Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement honour in 2010, presented to her by the President of Ireland. In the World Book Day poll of 2000, readers placed her third in a list of their favourite authors, behind only J.K. Rowling and Roald Dahl, and ahead of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Stephen King.

She married the writer and broadcaster Gordon Snell in 1977 and remained with him until her death. She died on 30 July 2012, in Dublin, from a heart attack, aged seventy-two. Her final novel, A Week in Winter, was published posthumously that same year. The outpouring of tributes from readers and fellow writers was remarkable; Ian Rankin, Anne Rice, and Jilly Cooper were among those who spoke of what she had meant to them. She was, as the immediate press coverage put it, Ireland’s best-loved novelist, and she had earned that description.