Michaela Kertesz 
‘Circle of Friends’ as novel and film version 

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject Didactics for the subject English — Literature, Works, grade: 2, 3, University of Regensburg (Anglistik), course: Hauptseminar: Modern Romance, language: English, abstract: And they all lived happily ever after… This is the typical ending of a romance novel. Why does it always have to be a happy end? What happens to the story if it does not end this way and how does the reader react? These are central questions I want to examine in this paper. Therefore I will look at Maeve Binchy’s Circle of Friends and the film version of the novel. My first step is to investigate the general structure of typical romances and the special meaning of the ending for a novel. Afterwards, with focus on the ending, I want to show how Circle of Friends deviates from these conventions. For this purpose I will also look in greater detail at the heroine in the novel. Another central question of my paper is why women read romance novels and how readers are influenced by an unusual ending of a book. In my last point I want to compare the ending of the novel Circle of Friends with the one of the film. All in all, this paper should illustrate that Circle of Friends is a special kind of romance which influences our reception of the story.