Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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This gap between the false surface and the dark thrust of tragic reality is why the narrator – and indeed the whole family – relies upon the ‘good behaviour’ of the title. When a tragedy occurs, everyone does their best to behave perfectly – to see who can cry the least, never mention it, ignore it and return to gardening or reading the Tatler. By forcing themselves to live in the surface, they try to make the surface cover up and suppress the underlying tragedy. This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.

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 ] 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: In this disparity between the shiny ‘honeyed’ surface and violent undercurrent, Molly Keane has quite ingeniously pulled off the feat of rendering a gap between what is understood by the narrator and what is understood by the reader. To my mind, this is one of the cleverest things a novelist can do. The writer has to create a blinkered narrator, deliberately limiting their knowledge, while at the same time dropping sufficient hints of the greater truth for the reader to grasp it. It’s a tough balance to get just right – not too obvious, not too obscure. Keane loved Jane Austen, and like Austen's, her ability lay in her talent for creating characters. This, with her wit and astute sense of what lay beneath the surface of people's actions, enabled her to depict the world of the big houses of Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. She "captured her class in all its vicious snobbery and genteel racism". [2] She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (including Good Behaviour and Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote 11 novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym "M. J. Farrell". [7] She was a member of Aosdána. [8] Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and, following the failure of a play, she published nothing for twenty years. In 1981 Good Behaviour came out 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. The novel was warmly received and was short-listed for the Booker Prize. [9] Personal life and death [ edit ]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’: David Higham Client Entry". Archived from the original on 1 September 2006 . Retrieved 16 September 2006. I definitely seem to have different tastes to the rest of my book club (although that said, most of them didn't like any of the characters in this, either, so maybe we were in sync this time). Forgotten the title or the author of a book? Our BookSleuth is specially designed for you. Visit BookSleuth 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.

The story is tightly focussed around Aroon's childhood and her "coming out" years and her first and only love affair with her brother's friend, Richard. Towards the end of the book there are a number of extended chapters that follow Aroon to a local Big House, where there is new money. There she learns of Richard's engagement to another and within the same night she loses her father. One of the servants, I don't believe it was the Nanny, provides Aroon with her only sex ed instruction, a graphic mention ending with "... and you won't like it!" At the risk of a spoiler, poor clueless Aroon spends her life devoted to her "lover" blind to the pathos of her ignorance to the end. 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. Another example of her self-delusion involves the relationship between Rose & her father after he has a stroke. There are several very transparent clues that Rose has been, to use vulgar parlance, giving the Major a hand job. Aroon even walks in on this once but says (believes?) that Rose was massaging the Major's cold foot! Even Aroon must know the location of a foot - it must have been obvious that the activity was occurring a bit higher than that! 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.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. 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. So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more. But nothing is directly named. The satire is sharp as is the dissection of emotional relationships: Setting is described incredibly well, without laying on excessive detail. My favorite was the night Aroon met a funeral guest at the station. In true farce style, Aroon never actually got to attend the funeral. Interestingly, she does mention that manor's Anglican chapel is only used for christenings, weddings and funerals; no call for services. Such things were so near and so apart from the honeyed life in Ireland. Every day was a perfect day that April. The scrawny beauty of our house warmed and melted in the spring light.

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. 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 ]Keane was born in 1904, in County Kildare. Her father, Walter Skrine, was a gentleman, a former colonial governor of Mauritius, and a fearless horseman, a man who “belonged to that species of Englishman who falls in love with Ireland”. Her mother, Agnes, was a poet (her Songs of the Glens of Antrim, published in 1901 under the pen name Moira O’Neill, sold 16,000 copies, outselling Yeats). And yet, in Molly’s youth, writing was something to hide – an undesirable gift that might frighten off the men. It was her duty to amuse – and she was good at it. She used to say: “Being a housewife is far more creative than writing but it does not pay so well.” In her milieu, riding mattered more than writing, and Phipps explains this in a way even the horse-averse will understand. Keane met her husband, Bobbie, at Woodroofe, a house where horsemanship was “an art form” practised with the “seriousness and insouciance of true artists in any sphere’’. An awkward teen she revels in her brother’s company and his friend Richard. The time the three spend together is the height of her happiness, little realising they too are indulging in ‘good behaviour’ masking an ulterior motive, using her as an alibi. Her self-deception knows no bounds. Type in any changes to the title, synopsis or contributor information using the Radio Times Style Guide for reference.