When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its success, calling it ‘too extraordinary’. But this extravagant tone was neither archness nor Mitfordian flippancy (although, appropriate to her upbringing, she exhibited a strong, unsnobbish belief in the value of taste). She meant it. Molly Keane (1904–96) never considered herself a writer: ‘It’s all a great surprise to me – if you were to give me some old book of mine I’d read it with great surprise as though I had no connection with it at all.’

Aroon is so naive, so deluded and so utterly alone. She is written brilliantly and heartbreakingly, a portrait of a woman who life just keeps shitting on. And most of the time she doesn’t even fully realise. I cringed at her cluelessness, her unfounded hope for love with Richard, her belief that they’d been ‘lovers’ after her climbed into bed with her for a minute once and did exactly nothing before leaving her again. It didn’t occur to her that he preferred her brother Hubert. I wanted to cry for her longing for love from her Papa, which came in the tiniest little scraps over her life. Her Mummie was the mother from hell, what chance did Aroon have. And all the while, everyone is so utterly repressed - the necessity of “Good Behaviour” means grief is dealt with by pretending everything is fine, nothing difficult is ever discussed, no true emotions are ever expressed. What an absolute mess the St Charles family is. All I can say is if this is not on your TBR list, please consider placing this book on it. If it is already on your TBR list, well…please consider bumping it up! 😊 🙃 😉 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’: Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. Though she herself tells the tale, we somehow see her morality’s disastrous consequences. Hilarious and sinister.”

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Keane has set herself a technical challenge. She must make us see all the things that Aroon doesn’t see. . . . There are many moments of brilliant, farcical comedy. . . . Keane’s prose roils with affect denied but persistently, pungently alive.” Another Anglo-Irish family whose members are dedicated to mutual assured destruction, even as they slide into genteel poverty. Nobody in the St Charles household would dream of treating the dogs or horses badly; servants and local tradesmen don't fare so well. But the brunt of their vituperation is saved for one another, with each family member nursing a store of petty grievances, both real and imaginary. Our guide for this particular version of hell is the unlovely, delusional daughter of the house, Aroon. Neglected by her philandering father, despised by her icy mother, used by her charming brother, she pines for love and approval. Her transformation to bitter, vengeful, old maid is inevitable and heartbreaking to watch. I stood about, smiling, compressed, submerged in politeness; aching in my isolation; longing to be alone; to be away; to be tomorrow's person

Information For Writers and Producers of Radio Drama". Archived from the original on 25 September 2005 . Retrieved 16 September 2006. Simultaneously light and dark, pleasurable and harrowing, Good Behaviour may appeal chiefly to readers drawn to characters who are a mixture of well-meaning and hilariously vile, victimizer and victim. . . . Aroon St. Charles is Molly Keane’s great creation, Good Behaviour her masterpiece.” 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! Diana Athill: Bad Behaviour is so clever, it’s mind-blowing…There are moments when the reader pauses to congratulate him or herself for being astute enough to twig what is really going on…It is as though we are seeing events unfold which we can then interpret for ourselves, and the effect of this is much more poignant than explication would be. 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.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).

We adored Papa, and his hopeless disapproval paralysed any scrap of confidence or pleasure we had ever had in ourselves or our ponies. Birdie deserves her escape with Walter, a visiting manservant, and just as she is lost to Angel, so are both Angel’s children. Unpredictably, Oliver departs with Julian’s fiancée, Sally. The novel’s dramatic conclusion, when each couple sails away, maroons and unmothers Angel. Julian’s leave-taking stopped me short: ‘You were quite perfect till I was twelve’. She has the wit to counter: ‘I liked you best at two.’ Keane was part of the decaying Anglo-Irish aristocracy/middle class. She wrote until 1946 when her husband died, and didn’t start again until 1981 when this novel was published and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. 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.

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Although the real identity of M. J. Farrell had long since become known in Irish and English literary circles, it was not until Good Behaviour that Keane felt secure in publishing under her own name. After the publication of Good Behaviour, her earlier works, including Conversation Piece and Rising Tide, were re-issued. The mother of the heroine must save money, well, it is commendable, except when "Her final objective was penance for all of us. She wanted everyone to suffer." Virtually uneducated, and by her own account ignored at home, as a young woman Molly effectively found herself a second family with the Perrys of County Tipperary. Their son, John Perry, was subsequently to co-author with her four plays that ran in the West End, with varying success, for over a decade. At the Perrys’, Molly met Bobby Keane, four years her junior and with whom she lived, unconventionally, for five years before they married. Her husband’s premature death in 1946 left her a penurious mother of two. It is widely believed that she fell silent for the following thirty years. In fact, Loving without Tears was published in 1951 and offers a full flavour of Molly Keane. A reviewer in The New York Times book review in August 1991 stated that Good Behaviour may well become "a classic among English Novels". It connected her in a personal way with the famous London editor, Diana Athill, who identified strongly with Keane after reading it, insisted on editing it herself, later calling the book "mindblowingly clever." [11]

While she finally has the opportunity to make a choice for herself, which should be to take her freedom; in my opinion, she does the wrong thing: she maintains this silly ideal of good behaviour no matter what dignity from which it follows that she does not allow herself to be happy: for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm: I would have been banned from every respectable house in Co. Carlow." The title is important and Kean has a way of using words effectively to put across a feeling with sinister undertones: It was through the Perry family that Molly met Bobby Keane, whom she married in 1938. [2] He belonged to a Waterford landed gentry family, the Keane baronets. [1] The couple went on to have two daughters, Sally and Virginia. [2] After the death of her husband in 1946, Molly moved to Ardmore, County Waterford, a place she knew well, and lived there with her two daughters. She died on 22 April 1996 in her Cliffside home in Ardmore. She was 91. She is buried beside the Church of Ireland church, near the centre of the village. [10] Critical reception [ edit ] Now the title extinct and estates entirely dissipated, Temple Alice, after several generations as a dower house (a house intended as the residence of a widow), came to Mummie when her mother died. Papa farmed the miserably few hundred acres that remained of the property.

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Here, to my delight , Hubert and Richard danced with me in turn. I almost preferred dancing with Hubert because I loved showing off to Richard…I was fulfilled by them. I felt complete. There was no more to ask. 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.