Keane was severely disappointed by the loss (which she shared with Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing). Once more, she had been judged obsolete; Rushdie’s boisterous postcolonial novel of India must have felt very new next to Keane’s satire of a long-dead ruling class. And yet there is something undeniably modern about Good Behaviour. If it’s too quaint to be new, it’s too cruel to be old. Perhaps the perfect time to read it is now, in a global pandemic, when time feels stopped, present and past atrocities knit together on a single stitch. Fueled by an undercurrent of rage yet as taut and crisp and tidy on the surface as a perfectly turned Sally Lunn cake, Good Behaviour is as delectable a horror story as you are likely to encounter. Enjoy every crumb. Mustn’t waste. Keane loved Jane Austen, and like Austen's, her ability lay in her talent for creating characters. This, with her wit and astute sense of what lay beneath the surface of people's actions, enabled her to depict the world of the big houses of Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. She "captured her class in all its vicious snobbery and genteel racism". [2] She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (including Good Behaviour and Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote 11 novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym "M. J. Farrell". [7] She was a member of Aosdána. [8] Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and, following the failure of a play, she published nothing for twenty years. In 1981 Good Behaviour came out under her own name; the manuscript, which had languished in a drawer for many years, was lent to a visitor, the actress Peggy Ashcroft, who encouraged Keane to publish it. The novel was warmly received and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. [9] Personal life and death [ edit ] So, no, definitely, no, I didn't like Molly Keane's characters, including the young Aroon. I only enjoy reading stories, real or fictional, about characters who raise themselves and raise me with them.

Impossible not to feel sympathy at moments like this for a girl who has only wanted ever to love and to be loved but whose soul has been suppressed through neglect and a lifetime of required good behaviour. This is one of those books where you really cannot trust the narrator. There must be many others like this, and I’d like to hear from other GR folks what books they can think of that come to mind regarding this genre – unreliable narrators of a story who tell their side of things and it’s distorted from what really happened. I read a fave book this year for the second time, A Debt to Pleasure (John Lanchester, 1996 – 1996 Whitbread Book Award in the First Novel category) …. that book, too, had an unreliable and devious narrator (Tarquin Winor). Yes, the young Aroon had parents who should never have been parents. Yes, she has a physique that does not meet the beauty criteria of her time. Yes, she was not loved. Either way, this was the start of a long career. The Knight of Cheerful Countenance was published by William Collins, Sons, in 1926, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell—a name Keane saw on a pub sign—because being an author wasn’t good behavior, especially for a woman. If anyone found out, she later said, she would have been considered “brainy.” In her twenties she wrote Young Entry (1928), Taking Chances (1929), Mad Puppetstown (1931), and Conversation Piece (1932), all witty horse-and-hound romances chronicling a dying way of life. Her sixth novel, Devoted Ladies (1934), features gay and lesbian characters modeled after the theater types she’d met at the home of her bisexual friend John Perry, and it marks a major break from her earlier novels, heralding a more mature phase. The next three books show Keane stretching herself in style and experimenting with darker subjects: Full House (1935) introduces the first of many monstrous mothers; The Rising Tide (1937), her best novel barring Good Behaviour, is an acid melodrama about a widow clinging to her Edwardian youth; and Two Days in Aragon (1941) takes on the Irish War of Independence, house-burning and all. But Keane could also be wounding. An unnamed friend remembers “darts thrown with extraordinary lethal accuracy like the banderoles of a skilled picador”. And Phipps does not omit the darts aimed in her direction: her mother need not have worried that she would be too nice – this biography is animated by kindness, but never at the expense of truth.

Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete. Although they feared to speak, Papa and Mummie spent more time together; but, far from comforting, they seemed to freeze each other deeper in misery.” This review is from Diana Athill. She was an editor for the publisher Andre Deutsch, and she was responsible for approving that the publishing house accept and publish the book…this is at the end of a review of the book written by Athill: “Not long before she died in 1996, when guiding a pen over paper had become difficult, she wrote me a little goodbye letter. In it she thanked me for publishing Good Behaviour, with the most emphatic declaration of how much it had meant to her – how it had given her a new life. It was a deeply sad letter, being such a clear indication that the end was near, but it was also a wonderfully generous gift. I am not a letter-keeper. But nothing would have made me throw that one away.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/201... But too soon the dream falls apart. Hubert is killed in a motoring accident and Richard disappears to Kenya. The death of son and heir and the earlier tragedy when Papa lost a leg in the battle fields of World War 1 barely disrupt the routine. For this is a house where every mishap or tragedy is shaken off, never spoken of and never allowed to interrupt the gardening or hunting. “Our good behaviour went on and on. . . no one spoke of the pain.” says Aroon after Hubert’s funeral. “ We exchanged cool, warning looks – which of us could behave the best: which of us could be least embarrassing…” Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them.” Molly Keane is a deeply sensitive writer and this novel is imbued with a humanity that reins in the theatrical plot and offers consolation, reflecting that peculiar synthesis of the familiar and conventional with the extraordinary that characterized the world of the Anglo-Irish.

Wow, this was really rather excellent. An author I’d not previously heard of, but a random episode of Between the Covers put me onto this 1981 Booker nominated novel. Thank you Sara Cox! Keane was born in 1904, in County Kildare. Her father, Walter Skrine, was a gentleman, a former colonial governor of Mauritius, and a fearless horseman, a man who “belonged to that species of Englishman who falls in love with Ireland”. Her mother, Agnes, was a poet (her Songs of the Glens of Antrim, published in 1901 under the pen name Moira O’Neill, sold 16,000 copies, outselling Yeats). And yet, in Molly’s youth, writing was something to hide – an undesirable gift that might frighten off the men. It was her duty to amuse – and she was good at it. She used to say: “Being a housewife is far more creative than writing but it does not pay so well.” In her milieu, riding mattered more than writing, and Phipps explains this in a way even the horse-averse will understand. Keane met her husband, Bobbie, at Woodroofe, a house where horsemanship was “an art form” practised with the “seriousness and insouciance of true artists in any sphere’’.Kierstead, Mary D. (13 October 1986). "Profiles: A great old breakerawayer". The New Yorker. Vol.62, no.34. pp.97–112.

She must have noticed my bosoms, swinging like jelly bags, bouncing from side to side; without words she conveyed the impression of what she had seen as unseemly- the Fat Lady in the peepshow. In Two Days in Aragon there are two would-be abortionists. Ann Daly is a ghost belonging to the high Ascendancy past. In the present of 1921, when Grania believes she is pregnant, the nurse and housekeeper, Nan (herself the daughter of a rape of a servant by the master of the house), offers to go to the chemist and ‘fix her up’: Then, as the reading progresses, as it is well done and well written, I end up letting myself go, although the characters remain bogged down in their inactive miserableness: Reviewers were generally appreciative of Keane's novels. Her mix of comic wit and poetic sensibility was called delightful. Some reviewers recoiled at the "indecent" subject of Devoted Ladies, which was a lesbian relationship between Jessica and Jane. Homosexuality was also a topic in Good Behaviour.Keane’s publisher of nearly fifty years rejected it, saying it was too nasty and suggesting she write at least one “nice” character. She refused. It sat in a drawer for years until her friend the actor Peggy Ashcroft read it during a visit and urged Keane to try again. Published to instant acclaim in 1981, it was nominated for the Booker Prize but lost to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. She was nearly eighty years old. It was her first book published under her real name.