Maeve Binchy (38 page)

The Burren, one of the largest limestone terrains in Europe where beauty, history and archaeology are strewn over the surface of the land.

Fanore, ‘a great place for the soul’. Suddenly everything in her life fitted into place. ‘It was a great charge to my spirit to come here,’ Maeve said.

Poll-na-Bron, one of the ninety megalithic tombs in the area, relic of a matriarchal society ruled by Brian Merriman’s Aoibhea, Queen of the Fairies.

Maeve typified the ‘new woman’: unmarried, career-focused and engaging in maximising herself as a person.

Maeve sensed an attachment to the spirit of Ireland, represented by Aoibhea, and returned to Cumann Merriman every year to draw on the collective unconscious of her people.

The Irish Women’s Liberation Movement was founded in 1970: ‘For too long women believed that somebody was going to come in and look after us. It’s degrading for half the human race to have to behave like that.’

Maeve came to grips with the secularisation of a God-fearing society, which sometimes ranged her against the views of family. Her brother, William, came out against divorce in 1986.

Geraldine Plunkett, Máire Hastings and Fedelma Cullen in the world premiere of
End of Term
, Maeve’s first play, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 1976.

The pier at Dún Laoghaire where Maeve’s imagination took flight. She found it easy to fill in ‘word pictures’ of people she encountered – a facility that led directly to her writing fiction.

Gordon Snell, trussed up in an olive green safari jacket for the BBC TV series,
Leap in the Dark
. After all the disappointment in her relations with men, he was exactly what Maeve needed.

When Anthony and Rosie Cheetham signed Maeve to write her first novel, her idea was to write about best friends who don’t share the truth and secretly despise each other.

Alan Gordon Walker, Maeve’s paperback publisher, paid a record sum for her first novel, but by 1993 her work was valued at ten times the amount.

By the time of
Firefly Summer (1987), Echoes
was being filmed and Maeve was in the novel-writing groove.