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.