Molly Keane

Sally Phipps

Molly Keane (1904 - 96) was an Irish novelist and playwright (born in County Kildare) most famous for Good Behaviour which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Hailed as the Irish Nancy Mitford in her day; as well as writing books she was the leading playwright of the '30s her work directed by John Gielgud. Between 1928 and 1956 she wrote eleven novels and some of her earlier plays under the pseudonym M.J. Farrell. In 1981 aged seventy she published Good Behaviour 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.

Molly Keane's novels reflect the world she inhabited; she was from a 'rather serious hunting and fishing church-going family'. She was educated as was the custom in Anglo-Irish households by a series of governesses and then at boarding school. Distant and awkward relationships between children and their parents would prove to be a recurring theme for Keane. Maggie O'Farrell wrote that 'she writes better than anyone else about the mother-daughter relationship in all its thorny fraught inescapable complexity.'

Here for the first time is her biography and written by one of her two daughters it provides an honest portrait of a fascinating complicated woman who was a brilliant writer and a portrait of the Anglo-Irish world of the first half of the twentieth century.

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