Maeve Binchy 1939-2012

Maeve was born in 1939, in Dublin, to a comfortable middle class family. Her relatives were lawyers and historians and teachers, and in a sense she was a new breed of Irish writer.  Mostly , previous writers had had a rural background.  Maeve was a Dubliner, like James Joyce but unlike him her family were form the well to do professional classes.

She started out as a teacher but then started to write light journalism and progressed to writing saga and romance type novels.

She attended University College Dublin and then became a teacher in various Schools including a Jewish school.  In the 1960s, she went to Israel to work on a kibbutz and wrote home to her parents about the work and life there.  Her parents were so impressed by her letters that they sent them to a newspaper.  She began to write more travel articles.  She travelled a great deal during the summers when she wasn’t teaching.  She lost her Catholic faith in the 60s when disappointed by the bare cavern she saw in Israel which was supposed to be the site of the Last Supper. 

Gradually she moved into full time journalism.  She had always been a large lady, tall and somewhat overweight.  She had painful osteo-arthritis, which began to limit her traveling and make it more difficult for her to work, but she was always a prolific writer.  In the 70s she met her husband Gordon Snell. They married in 1977 and moved to Ireland to settle down.  Because of her weight problems she had always lacked self-confidence and believed that she would not be likely to marry.  However her marriage to Gordon was a very happy one; they had no children…but they lived together until her death in 2012.

Her weight caused other health problems such as heart trouble, but she always had difficulty dieting.  She was very well loved because she was a warm, kindly sunny natured person, and was sadly missed.

In 1982, she began to write fiction well as her light journalism.  Her articles were mostly jokey ones about people. She would listen to people talking; everywhere she went... and write light but kindly pieces about them.

 Her first novels, such as “Echoes” and “Circle of Friends” were set back in the Ireland of her childhood and teenage years, and were mostly about young girls growing up in rural or seaside towns.  While boyfriends were part of their lives, there was also an emphasis on finding work, managing family problems and female friendships.  I never liked her later novels so much as the first few.  I think I preferred the older Ireland.  After the first 3 or 4 novels, Maeve began to set them in present day Ireland and I found them duller and the characters were less likable.  Another theme was betrayal... Usually men having affairs often with their partner’s female friends.  This theme started to become very depressing!

 She has had some of her books made into TV movies or films, most notably Circle of Friends.  This film came out in 1995 and was a very bad adaptation and completely negated the point of the book… which was that Benny the rather fat heroine grew in confidence and did not depend on a boyfriend, to make her happy.