I've put 'good' in inverted commas, because it's behaviour but the 'good' part is certainly in question as we follow their shenanigans playing musical beds, drama with the governess and the neighbours etcetera etcetera all under the 'innocent' eyes of Aroon, born and well bred with the 'stiff upper lip' culture. Uneducated in what she is seeing she puts everything as she's told under 'good' manners, you can do anything if you say please and thankyou and not moan about. Even kill your mother.

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. 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.” We adored Papa, and his hopeless disapproval paralysed any scrap of confidence or pleasure we had ever had in ourselves or our ponies. 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. All my life so far I have done everything for the best reasons and the most unselfish motives,” says Aroon St. Charles, the tall, bosomy antiheroine of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, minutes after killing her mother . “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.”Widows and spinsters had always appeared as minor characters in her books—marriageable men were thin on the ground after World War I—but in this new phase of her career, when Molly was an unmarried woman in her thirties, they took center stage. Keane’s fascination with these “excellent women,” who were expected to toil socially while suppressing all private feeling, aligns her with Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the other British grandes dames of spinster lit—many of whom were themselves spinsters and widows. While it may appear that there is little to like or admire among the book’s characters—including Richard, Hubert’s intimate friend, with whom Aroon falls hopelessly and eternally in love, against all odds—Keane supplies a cast of supporting players who give us hope for humanity. Take Rose, the redoubtable housemaid-turned-cook-turned nurse, who tirelessly cared for Aroon’s father, bedridden (minus one leg) and virtually helpless after a stroke, and who was not above giving him a bit of sexual relief under the blankets. She has enough generosity and humanity to ward off the icy breezes generated by most every other character. Though she does feel the pain when her hopes of marriage fade, she will not show it for she has learned to be a dutiful daughter and how to behave in the same socially impeccably manner as her parents. Phoning the doctor to report her mother’s death for example to the others she has time to observe: In her teenage years she spent much of her time in the Perry household in Woodruff, County Tipperary. Here she befriended the two children of the house, Sylvia and John Perry. She later collaborated with John in writing a number of plays. Among them was Spring Meeting, directed by John Gielgud in 1938, and one of the hits of the West End that year. She and Gielgud became lifelong friends. [2] Career [ edit ] With Good Behaviour she achieved something quite extraordinary. She makes Aroon, her narrator, tell a long and complicated story without ever understanding what that story is about. This is mindblowingly clever – and the best thing about it is that it is never clever for the sake of cleverness. There are moments when the reader pauses to congratulate him or herself for being astute enough to twig what is really going on – but never any when he or she is exclaiming “Clever Molly”. But clever Molly has used her “distancing” technique to turn us into something nearer watchers than story-readers. 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.

In Loving without Tears, the widowed Angel, châtelaine of Owlbeg and the apogee of maternal selfishness, manipulates her children and household in equal measure, wishing only to repossess her returning son Julian. The novel was written only a few years after Bobby Keane’s death, and it is hard for Angel’s predicament not to resonate: she is ‘father and mother, too. A hopeless combination.’ This harshness belies the clear-sighted tenderness with which Angel is drawn. She can give as much as she takes, reminiscing to her retainer and erstwhile lover, Oliver: ‘You were so sad and sweet when we found you, that last lovely spring before the war, all alone in the Austrian Tyrol – and a gentian in your hat.’ It was these small accuracies that tied her charm to life. A clever, poisonous novel about largely unclever, poisonous people, a snobbish, financially distressed Anglo-Irish family. They do no work, and are contemptuous of anyone who does, horrified by the effrontery of tradespeople and staffers who expect to be paid for their services. Their home is in a state of decay and their sense of entitlement is endless.

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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. Like Good Behaviour, the novel proceeds in a series of intense domestic scenes and results in a series of pairings which leave Angel alone, ‘as sad as a French cemetery’. Her housekeeper, Birdie, is brilliantly described: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011230325/http://www.virago.co.uk/author_results.asp?TAG=&CID=&PGE=&LANG=EN&ref=e2007030614553308&SF1=data&ST1=profile Molly Keane’s literary career followed an unusual trajectory. She was born, in County Kildare, into a prelapsarian, Anglo-Irish idyll in which beautiful houses and riding to hounds through the bogs of southern Ireland featured large. She recalled ‘a society in which I wanted to get on jolly well. I know that sounds awful but it wasn’t a snob thing at all. To belong to and be accepted in such a society mattered greatly in one’s life.’ At 17, she wrote her first novel, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance (1921), published by Mills & Boon, to supplement her insufficient dress allowance. 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.