Molly Keane A Life

A wonderfully honest and deeply accomplished tribute to a complicated, talented mother and writer - 'An Irish writer whose only equal is Elizabeth Bowen' ( Bookseller) - by her daughter. Just before she died, the Anglo-Irish writer Molly Keane, best remembered for her Man Booker shortlisted novel, Good Behaviour, a brilliantly sharp novel about a mother-daughter relationship, suggested her eldest daughter might write about her. 'Make it as much like a novel as possible'. An arrestingly graceful, truthful and compassionate portrait of a relationship with a mother who was both lethal and loving' Miranda Seymour, TLS 'A vivid and sensitive portrait of Anglo-Irish society . . . finely attuned to the complexities of her mother's character, and captures the mix of "courage, glamour and fantasy" that sustained her class.' Selina Guinness, Irish Times'Phipps, in recounting her rackety mother's huntin' dancin' drinkin' life, the sparkle of her early novels and the darkness of her late ... is forgiving and acute' Claudia FitzHerbert, Sunday Telegraph 'Sally Phipps light-footedly brings Molly Keane back to life, and makes one grateful for the illusion of having met her' Kate Kellaway, Observer 'The novelist's daughter, and herself a born writer... If you are to read only one biography this year, make it Sally Phipps's ... this is memoir as work of art' Thomas McCarthy, Irish Examiner 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.