A Week in Winter

Maeve Binchy was a prolific Irish author known for her “quiet feminism” and portrayals of everyday Irish life. She was born in 1939, just before the start of the Second World War, in Dalkey, a seaside town in the greater Dublin area. She studied at University College Dublin, where several characters from her novels also study, and went on to become a journalist for the Irish Times newspaper before becoming a full-time novelist. During her lifetime, she spent several years living in London for her journalism work, where she met her future husband, Gordon Snell. The couple later returned to Ireland and settled in Dalkey. Despite the prevalence of small, intimate villages in Binchy’s work, she spent much of her own life in major cities.

Across her lifetime, Binchy wrote 17 full-length novels, four short story collections, a novella, and a radio play. Of these, several feature recurring characters and settings. For example, in A Week in Winter, some of the characters go to visit a fictional, high-end Dublin restaurant called “Quentins.” This same restaurant is explored in more detail in the novel Quentins and also mentioned in some of her other works. Binchy is also known for her successful debut novel Light a Penny Candle, which earned an unprecedented advance (particularly for a female writer), as well as the novels Circle of Friends and Tara Road, both of which were made into films. A Week in Winter, the last novel she wrote before her death, was published posthumously. By this point, Binchy had proclaimed herself retired from “big books,” ending with her novel Scarlet Feather in the year 2000. However, she went on to produce more independent short stories and novels composed of interlocking short stories (A Week in Winter is an example of this format.

Maeve Binchy achieved a level of international, commercial recognition largely unknown by Irish writers, and certainly by Irish women, prior to the contemporary phenomenon of Sally Rooney. Binchy inspired many pilgrimages to her fictional Irish settings by North American and international readers; her work presents an Ireland that is at once both idealistic and grounded in real, lived identity. Throughout her life, she was honored with the Irish PEN award, a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Book Awards, the British Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, and other accolades for her individual works.

In 2012, shortly before the publication of A Week in Winter, Binchy passed away due to accumulated health concerns that resulted in heart failure. Numerous tributes from around the world poured in for the author’s contribution to contemporary Irish literature; later that same year, a garden was erected behind the Dalkey library in her memory, and two years later, University College Dublin introduced the Maeve Binchy Travel Award for aspiring writers. Today, more than a decade after her death, her work continues to reach new audiences in Ireland and abroad. Her books have sold more than 40 million copies around the world.