Circle of Friends

The popular and prolific Irish novelist Maeve Binchy published Circle of Friends in 1990. Spanning a decade in 1950s Dublin and its surroundings, the novel is a coming-of-age story that follows the lives of several girls as they grow into young women, navigate romantic relationships, and try to come to terms with who they are as people. Using a series of shifting perspectives and a wide lens that accommodates a variety of secondary and tertiary characters with their own arcs and journeys, Binchy paints a realistic portrait of teens and twenty-somethings in the middle of the last century. Since publication, the book has been made into a well-received movie starring Minnie Driver and Chris O’Donnell.

When the novel opens, we meet the two young women who will be the anchors of the “circle of friends” that will eventually grow around them: Bernadette Hogan, known as Benny, and Eve Malone. The two have grown up together in the fictional town of Knockglen, and although they are very close, their family lives are polar opposites. Benny is the daughter of warm, loving, and overprotective parents who own a clothing business – Hogan’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters. Benny is kind and outgoing, but is overly tall and overweight, which makes her feel anxious about her looks. Eve, on the other hand, is pretty and thin, but has been an orphan since infancy and has grown up in a convent raised by nuns. She does have distant aristocratic family on her mother’s side, but they are estranged from her because they look down on her mother’s marriage to a middle-class man.

Benny and Eve have just graduated from school and are trying to figure out their college options. Benny’s family can afford to send her to the University College of Dublin – but they want to control her as much as possible despite her increasing independence, so they insist that she comes back home to Knockglen from Dublin every night. Meanwhile, despite the efforts of the convent Mother Superior (Mother Francis), there isn’t enough money to send Eve to college. Instead, the plan is for her to work as a servant in a Dublin convent while going to secretarial school. Unhappy with this option, Eve overcomes her resentment of the upper-class Westward family who abandoned her mother and asks her wealthy cousin Simon Westward to pay for her college education. To everyone’s surprise, he says yes.



On the first day of a school, a classmate’s accidental death links Benny and Eve with a few other students, including Nan Mahon and Jack Foley. Nan was born to a working-class Dublin family and is stunningly beautiful. She has been raised by her mother to be an ambitious, status-conscious striver who wants to marry well in order to escape her family (particularly her alcoholic father). Jack is a good-looking and popular young man.

This circle of friends is shocked when Jack falls in love with Benny – ostensibly, he is way out of her league. Benny’s overbearing parents are dismayed at the news. But no one is more annoyed than Sean Walsh, a smarmy and creepy young man who works in their shop as an assistant and whose plans include marrying Benny in order to inherit the family business – a plan that is completely in line with what her parents imagine for her.

Nan meets Eve’s cousin Simon and is impressed by his seemingly high social position as a member of the Protestant Anglo-Irish ascendancy class (as opposed to the other characters who are all Catholic and purely Irish). Nan and Simon have a relationship and she even has sex with him – a shocking idea in the very religious society of their time. Unfortunately, what Nan doesn’t realize is that although they have been putting up appearances, Simon’s family is no longer very wealthy. (In fact, the reason he paid for Eve’s college tuition was to keep up the ruse that they have money to burn.) Rather than thinking of Nan as wife material, Simon wants to marry someone with significant wealth. Nan gets pregnant, and when she tells Simon, he dumps her and gives her money for an abortion.



While this is happening, Benny’s father dies. Forced to come back to Knockglen for long periods of time to oversee the business, Benny at first plans to agree to a partnership with Sean, who claims that her father was just on the cusp of signing over half the business when he died. But then she realizes that there is something deeply off about the accounts that Sean has been keeping. It turns out that he has been embezzling funds from the company and Benny fires him.

All the time that Benny spends in her small town creates a rift in her relationship with Jack, who has always acted in a way that makes it clear that he takes her for granted. After all, isn’t a girl like her lucky to be with a guy like him? Annoyed that she isn’t at his beck and call, Jack starts cheating on Benny with Nan. Nan quickly sleeps with Jack and then tells him that he is the father of her baby. In keeping with the mores of the time, Jack feels obligated to propose and he and Nan get engaged. The news shocks the friend circle and Benny feels heart-broken.

At a party, Benny confronts Nan, and pieces together the truth about everything that Nan has done. In the middle of the fight, Nan falls through a glass door and is injured enough to have a miscarriage. Now that she is no longer pregnant, Jack calls off their engagement and tries to get back together with Benny. The novel ends with her realization that she deserves to be treated better than an always-available door mat, and she concludes that she no longer thinks of Jack as anything other than one of the many members in her circle of friends.