SOMETIMES, WITH authors, there is a great gap between the person and the writing. In the case of Maeve Binchy, though, the two were inseparable. They came from exactly the same source: an insatiable curiosity about people. It was inquisitiveness of a particular kind – not prurient or insensitive but animated by a genuine fascination with humanity in all its infinite variety. She paid attention to people. She did it in her brilliant observational journalism for The Irish Times.
She did it in her novels. But she also did it on a day-to-day level, with everyone she worked with or met, with the young writers who looked to her for advice, with the fans who looked on her as a friend.
To Maeve, there was no such thing as an ordinary person – and therefore no such thing as a VIP. As a journalist, she famously treated a British royal wedding with exactly the same amused curiosity that she would bring to a country wedding in Kinnegad. She did so, not out of malice or a desire to shock, but because it did not occur to her that there were different categories of humanity.
Her gift as a storyteller was rooted in this fascination with people. She was the great anti-snob. She believed that every human life, however well or little known, contains the stuff of epic drama: friendship, hope, love, failure, loss, endurance and a warm, generous, forgiving laughter. And it was this that made her, in her own very special way, an important feminist. It is not incidental that she was a pioneering women’s editor of The Irish Times before she was a world-famous author. She was not, in any exclusive sense, a “women’s writer”. But in the Ireland she grew up in, the lives of women were especially in need of her kind of benign and tolerant attention. She gave a quiet, unsentimental, gently humorous dignity to stories of otherwise obscure female lives, and women everywhere loved her for it.
Her work opened the way for a whole generation of Irish female novelists, but it also performed an important service for Irish fiction as a whole. Irish stories have long had a cachet internationally, but their allure was that they were exotic, different, strange. Maeve Binchy showed that Irish stories could succeed internationally without being at all exotic. Her characters happen to be Irish, but their aspirations and dilemmas are the same as those of middle-class people anywhere.
In our celebrity-obsessed culture it is not hard to be adored or idolised, at least for a while. Maeve Binchy will always have, and deserve, something much more important: she is enduringly loved.