The Irish writer Molly Keane is best known for her 1981 novel Good Behaviour which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is a darkly comic book charting the gradual decay of an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family sinking under a mountain of unpaid bills and appalling secrets, while maintaining a stiff upper lip at all times.
Molly shot to fame with this book in her late sixties – until then she’d written under a genderless pseudonym - M. J. Farrell - to hide her literary leanings from her huntin’, fishin’ shootin’ set.
Martha discussed the importance of this underrated writer, who was known as “The Jazz Age Jane Austen,” with author Polly Devlin and lecturer Eibhear Walshe.
Molly Keane: Centenary Essays Co-edited by Eibhear Walshe and Gwenda Young. Publisher, Four Courts Press, ISBN: 1-85182-956-3 |
