Circle of Friends (novel)
Overview
Maeve Binchy
Maeve Binchy is an Irish novelist, newspaper columnist and speaker. Educated at University College Dublin, she worked as a teacher then a journalist at The Irish Times and later became a writer of novels and short stories.Many of her novels are set in Ireland, dealing with the tensions between...
. It is set in Dublin and the fictitious town of Knockglen in rural Ireland
Ireland
Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...
during the 1950s, and centres around a group of university students.
As with her previous novels, Binchy writes about a large cast of characters:
- Benny Hogan - a sensitive, ungainly country girl from Knockglen.
- Eve Malone - a convent-raised orphan related to the Anglo-IrishAnglo-IrishAnglo-Irish was a term used primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries to identify a privileged social class in Ireland, whose members were the descendants and successors of the Protestant Ascendancy, mostly belonging to the Church of Ireland, which was the established church of Ireland until...
Westward family. - Nan Mahon - a beautiful, ambitious girl from a working-class Dublin family who seeks to marry into wealth.
- Jack Foley - a handsome, popular doctor's son who falls in with with Benny.
- Aidan Lynch - a likeable young man with a sense of humour who dates Eve.
- Simon Westward - Eve's first cousin and a member of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy class.
- Heather Westward - Simon's younger sister, who becomes attached to Eve.
- Sean Walsh - an odious young man who works for Benny's father and assumes he will marry into the family business.
- Mother Francis - the head of St.
Unanswered Questions
