One of Ireland's most successful novelists, loved for her kindness and generosity of spirit
Maeve Binchy, who has died aged 72, was a larger-than-life author and journalist, whose novels about love and romance in Ireland sold more than 40m copies in 37 languages. Among the most popular were Light a Penny Candle (1982), Echoes (1985), Circle of Friends (1990) and Tara Road (1998). The last of these, the story of two women who exchange homes in Ireland and the US for a magical summer, was promoted by Oprah Winfrey, ensuring runaway sales. In 1995 Circle of Friends, about childhood friends from the village of Knockglen, was made into a film starring Chris O'Donnell and Minnie Driver. Tara Road and the short story How About You? also became feature films, and The Lilac Bus (1984) and Echoes were made into television films.
Maeve's novels dealt with issues such as betrayal and child-parent relationships, tensions between rural and urban life, and the transformations in Irish cultural and religious life in the late 20th century, and she left sex scenes to the imagination rather than provide graphic detail. This formula made her an international bestseller and put her in the top 10 of Britain's most popular writers. Her fellow novelist Anne Enright said Maeve had an unsurpassed grasp of what makes a good story and that reading her was like being with a good friend: "Wise, generous, funny and full-hearted, she was the best of good company on the page and off it."
Binchy was born in Dalkey, County Dublin, the eldest of four children. She recalled how as a child she was "fat and hopeless at games" but very happy, as her parents "thought all their geese were swans". She went to convent school in the nearby village of Killiney, graduated from University College, Dublin, and worked for a time as a teacher, writing short stories during her holidays, before joining the Irish Times in 1968.
To her readers around the world Maeve was a warm-hearted, compassionate novelist, and to aspiring Irish writers she was an inspiration and a source of encouragement and practical advice. But to those of her generation in Ireland she was also – to some even more so – the funny, irreverent Irish Times columnist whose highly descriptive take on Irish life transformed the nature of colour writing in newspapers. Her early articles became popular for "puncturing pomposity", as her long-time colleague and friend Mary Maher put it.
In 1972 she was posted to the Irish Times London office, where her account of the wedding of Princess Anne to Captain Mark Phillips the following year was so notably lacking in the conventional reverent prose ("The bride looked as edgy as if it were the Badminton Horse Trials and she was waiting for the bell to gallop off") that it unleashed an avalanche of letters from readers – outraged and delighted in equal numbers.
Her natural talent for storytelling was such that she wrote just the way she spoke. As her colleague in London in the mid-1970s I would find her typing at speed and handing the first draft to the telex operator before heading off for one of her long lunches. She dared not reread the copy, she said, or she would spend the day rewriting it. It was this natural fluency that enabled her to produce 16 novels, several collections of short stories and a play in the last 30 years of her life.
In London, in 1977, Maeve married the writer and former BBC World Service broadcaster Gordon Snell, and they maintained homes in both London and Dublin before settling permanently in Ireland. She wrote that, like her parents, Gordon believed: "I could do anything, and I started to write fiction and that took off fine."
Their Georgian cottage in Dalkey was so unpretentious that when a Hollywood producer came to discuss filming Circle of Friends, he asked about the location of her "real house". Maeve and Gordon wrote together in the same room, an arrangement that worked very well because, as she put it, she was a lark and he was an owl, though mainly because of the unabashed love and affection they always showed for each other. Two years ago, Maeve explained in the Irish Independent why Irish people are thought of as being good writers: "We don't like pauses and silences, we prefer talk and information and conversations that go on and on. So that means we are halfway there."
In Ireland it is her warm personality as much as her books that will be remembered, and everyone, it seems, has a fond encounter or conversation with her to tell. One of my own relates to an episode in the 1970s when I rather disloyally sent to Private Eye, which paid five pounds for accounts of journalistic cock-ups, a cutting from the Irish Times which had mixed up photographs of the head of the KGB and Private Eye's editor Richard Ingrams. The day it was published, I met Maeve and asked her if she had seen Private Eye. "I have," she said, "And I got my fiver in the post this morning."
Maeve was a wonderful humorist, often telling hilarious anecdotes, many against herself. She related, for instance, how when the US first lady Barbara Bush invited her to a lunch with other writers in the White House and everyone was asked what they would like to drink, she politely requested a white wine rather than her usual gin and tonic, and then watched in dismay as the others primly ordered mineral water and a full bottle of wine was produced for the one rather mortified Irish guest.
Maeve announced her retirement some years ago, but the books kept coming. Her 17th, A Week in Winter, will be published in October. She won several honours for her writing, among them a lifetime achievement award at the British Book Awards in 1999 and the Irish Pen/AT Cross literary award in 2007 for a lifetime of literary achievement.
Many have spoken of Maeve's generosity of spirit, but she was also recklessly generous. When she received a substantial payment from the paperback rights to Light a Penny Candle, her first novel, she distributed much of it quietly to family, friends and colleagues (enough to pay my mortgage for a month). When she became rich and famous, she replied to every letter asking for help, advice or money.
Shortly before her death, Maeve told the Irish Times: "I've been very lucky and I have a happy old age with good friends and family still around." In truth, she suffered terribly in her last years from arthritis, while remaining cheerful and concerned about others.
Maeve is survived by Gordon, her brother, William, and her sister, Joan.
Anne McHardy writes: Maeve Binchy was London editor of the Irish Times when I first met her in the 1970s. It was at a Christmas dinner in Fleet Street and she was, as always, holding court. As the evening became night she stood to her full 6ft to sing, with Gordon Snell, the husband who had driven a series of badhat lovers out of her life for ever, singing too. Maeve was an imposing if slightly ungainly figure. Over the next year, I saw her often before she returned to Dublin. When Light a Penny Candle was published, I was delighted to find it written in the same seemingly effortless style as her journalism. It was the ease of an organised, brisk, shrewd mind that sifted words internally before uttering them.
Twenty years later, I was writing about arthritis and Maeve was an obvious contact. It was before her hip operation and her pain was often debilitating. I rang and was greeted with a verbal bear hug. Her attention to detail included an ability to remember people. "When will you be over ... ?" The resilience with which she dealt with her pain remains humbling.
• Maeve Binchy, writer, born 28 May 1940; died 30 July 2012