She's the recipient of as many superlatives from ordinary fans as awards from the literary élite. Just to prove how special she is, RTé One's Christmas Day schedule featured the documentary Maeve Binchy: At Home in the World. This came just two months after the Dublin author received a lifetime achievement award for her contribution to Irish literature.

What exactly has that contribution been? Her novels about love and friendship – many set in the Ireland of the 1950s and '60s in which she grew up – have been described as romantic fiction. One journalist dubbed her "the mammy of bestselling chicklit writers". It's true that she is the most unpretentious of writers in a profession known for massive egos. Some argue that her books are more likely to engage the heart than the intellect. But Maeve Binchy is not so easily categorised. And this irrepressibly sunny 70-year-old, who has sold over 40 million books in over 40 countries, also has that iron confidence necessary in any great writer.

Self-belief was instilled early on in life by her parents at home in Dalkey, Co Dublin. She recalls nervously heading out on her very first dance with her mother's words ringing in her ears. "She told me, 'You look so beautiful, you'll take the sight right out of their eyes.' It was so patently untrue – I've seen the pictures! But I went there with such happiness because I thought I looked so beautiful." Confidence, she still believes, was also the best thing she instilled in her young charges when becoming a teacher during the 1960s.

Getting a good education was another priority set by her parents, and their eldest daughter comes from a family of high achievers. Her brother William, like his father before him, is a barrister, now Regius Professor of Law at Trinity, and has been a vigorous campaigner against divorce and abortion in various constitutional campaigns. Maeve's first novel, Light a Penny Candle, and subsequent bestsellers Echoes and Circle of Friends, are set in those decades of the mid-20th century when the influence of the Catholic church was at its most oppressive. She has spoken of the degree of fear that prevailed then. "We were all terrified of sin, and sex was explained to us very, very badly. The greatest evil that could befall a family was getting pregnant without being married."

The "secrecy and hypocrisy" of those times are gone she believes, yet her later novels, such as Tara Road, still touch on the darker side of relationships. Her books reveal an insight into the working of the human heart, even though marriage is "a fragile thing… and no one really understands how it works".

Her own happy marriage to English writer Gordon Snell in 1977 was discussed in the Christmas documentary, and she talked about her unexpected discovery of lasting love. No children of their own came along, but the couple delighted in the company of those of other family members and friends. She is the auntie any teenager would adore: "I used to love them aged between 14 and 15, when their parents were exhausted by them." While living in London, she could do "outrageous things, like take them to over-16 movies when they were underage". Her literary output aside, it's that sense of fun which makes this latter-day Queen Maeve a living national treasure.