Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy was an Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and journalist, born on 28 May 1940 in Dalkey.
She was educated at University College Dublin and worked as a school teacher before pursuing careers in journalism and fiction writing. Writing in the English language, she produced novels, short stories, and plays across the course of her life. Her work brought her recognition in multiple forms, including the Irish PEN Award, the British Book Awards, and the Irish Book Awards.
Among her novels, Light a Penny Candle stands as one of her titles, alongside Circle of Friends, Tara Road, and Scarlet Feather. These works represent the range of her output as a novelist, a form she sustained alongside her shorter fiction and her work as a playwright. The awards she received — spanning Irish and British recognition — reflect the reach of her readership during her lifetime.
Binchy died on 30 July 2012 in Dublin, having been born more than seven decades earlier in Dalkey. Her working life encompassed teaching, journalism, and the writing of fiction and drama, with her novels among the most formally prominent of her outputs. The breadth of her roles — novelist, short story writer, playwright, journalist, and teacher — defines the professional range she maintained throughout her career.
Quotes by Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy's insights on:
I don't have ugly ducklings turning into swans in my stories. I have ugly ducklings turn into confident ducks.
We're nothing if we're not loved. When you meet somebody who is more important to you than yourself, that has to be the most important thing.
I believed that old people never laughed. I thought they sighed a lot and groaned. They walked with sticks, and they didn't like children on bicycles or roller skates... or with big dogs.
I didn't have a sweet tooth, but I liked butter, and I liked sauces, and I liked wine... and curry... and cheeses.
Is there anything more harsh in this life than to be misjudged, and have one’s motives entirely misunderstood?
Problems don’t solve themselves neatly like that, due to a set of coincidences. Problems are solved by making decisions. Erika had always said that, and he had thought she was being doctrinaire. But it was true. Deciding not to change anything was a decision in itself. He hadn’t fully understood this before.
God, Benny, don’t blow your nose like that in the church. You’d lift half the congregation out of their seats,” Patsy warned.
It was true what they had been saying: if people remember you, then you’re not dead. It was very comforting.
Eve showed Aidan how to rake the range. “I think when we’re married we might have something more modern,” he grumbled. “No, surely with the eight children we can have them stoking it, going up the chimney even.
2. Men like women without make-up. They don’t. They like extremely well and carefully made-up women whose skin has that expensive cultured look which comes from three hours at the dressing table. A woman who is really without make-up would frighten them to death. They regard blotches as eczema, and uneven colouring as a sign of tertiary syphilis.