The book was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize which was eventually won by Salman Rushdie with “Midnight’s Children”. Others on shortlist were Ian McEwan (The Comfort of Strangers) and Doris Lessing (The Sirian Experiments). Well, at least some folks had the good sense to put it on the shortlist. The protagonist of Good Behaviour is Iris Aroon St Charles, daughter of an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family, who grows up with her brother Hubert in ‘Temple Alice’ one of the ‘Big Houses’, built by an ancestor as his temporary residence until inheriting his titles and estates. Molly Keane's study of the 'good' behaviour of a family of Irish aristocrats and their servants in the 1920's is superb. 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. 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:

I had the satisfaction of knowing that she was less happy and therefore that I was more important."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. Part of the Anglo-Irish diaspora, I grew up not questioning what it meant to be berated as a ‘rip’ or an ‘eejit’ when I had been villainous or wilful, or both. I’ve been down many a ‘boreen’ on either side of the Irish Sea and know that ‘a cup of scald’ is the best remedy when one feels ‘shook’, preferably taken by an ever-burning turf (never peat) fire. English boarding-school, however, instilled in me the niceties of what can and cannot, should and should not be said. So when, as a teenager, I first read Good Behaviour, purely because my grandmother had been a playmate of its author as a girl, I could entirely relate to, even hear, its dextrous linguistic parade, from the politesse of the narrator Aroon’s family – secretive, inhibited and duplicitous overlords – to the verve of the native, serving Irish, conversely just as manipulative of their masters. And it is a marvellous story. Revisiting it nearly thirty years later was a revelation and compelled me to seek out all her other, lesser-known novels in what became an odyssey into a vanished world that, like the best fictional demesnes, exists fully formed and invites exploration. I had time to consider how the punctual observance of the usual importances is the only way to behave at such times as these. And I do know how to behave –believe me, because I know. I have always known. All my life so far have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives. I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy.” 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." Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996), [1] née Mary Nesta Skrine, and who also wrote as M. J. Farrell, was an Irish novelist and playwright.

I really wish I had written this book. It’s a tragi-comedy set in Ireland after the First World War. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on. You read it with mounting horror and hilarity as you begin to grasp her delusion. When Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour was first published in 1981, the author was 76. Decades earlier, as “M.J. Farrell,” she had written a number of well-received novels—“horsey, housey romances” one critic called them—that drew upon her post-WWI life in County Kildare, Ireland, the daughter of a whose passion for dogs and horses left little time for parenting, and of a mother who made a name—though she too used a nom de plume—as a minor regional poet. Keane began writing as a means of making extra money and chose her pseudonym (from a random pub sign) to avoid the approbation of her peers: Women were discouraged from reading books, much less writing them. Keane stopped working and threw herself into domestic hobbies. “My writing is dated,” she said. “This is the end and there is nothing I can do.” For years she had expressed the unspeakable in her writing, caricaturing her acquaintances to sell out the secrets of her class. Her witty, melancholic books had chronicled their abortions and suicides and affairs, their neglected children and abused elders, their inadmissible loneliness and the shameful, ever-present fear of being killed on a horse. She had done it all under a pseudonym. But the best behavior of all is silence. 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.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. 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.