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’:

When Molly Keane’s best-known novel, Good Behaviour (1981), was pipped to the Booker Prize post by Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children she did not much mind. She was ‘ecstatic’ over its success, calling it ‘too extraordinary’. But this extravagant tone was neither archness nor Mitfordian flippancy (although, appropriate to her upbringing, she exhibited a strong, unsnobbish belief in the value of taste). She meant it. Molly Keane (1904–96) never considered herself a writer: ‘It’s all a great surprise to me – if you were to give me some old book of mine I’d read it with great surprise as though I had no connection with it at all.’I had the satisfaction of knowing that she was less happy and therefore that I was more important." 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.”

Bobbie died, two years later, of a blood clot, after an operation on a duodenal ulcer. They had been married just eight years. It’s like a scene from a Wes Anderson film. You are immersed in one set of details until your eye is drawn by a sudden shift in focus to what lies beyond or slightly outside the frame. The serpents, the flesh-eating dahlias, and above all the artificiality of the tableau foreshadow the sisters’ downfall. They will be chewed up and spat out by the system, having failed to game it properly. But this is a version of Anglo-Irish decline as far as possible from the plangent world of William Trevor, or even Elizabeth Bowen. I think this is what you would describe as a book for grown-ups - and yes there is plenty of sex. But what is interesting here is Keane's in-depth knowledge of her main character, Aroon St. Charles. I read Good Behaviour with the help of my friend, Canadian Reader and I think she would agree, that neither of us liked or felt an iota of sympathy for Aroon until we had finished the book and stepped away f There is a family likeness (though she is never slavishly imitative) between Phipps’s writing and her mother’s. Keane’s writing was sensual and Phipps’s is too: she gives us the texture of the past. She describes Molly as “a child of nature and of the drawing room”, and revisits the rooms that now survive only in her mother’s novels, where “sun still bleaches a hall table and silk curtains rot slowly in the windows, or a master cook lifts a perfectly risen soufflé from her sulky kitchen range”.Molly Keane's study of the 'good' behaviour of a family of Irish aristocrats and their servants in the 1920's is superb. Molly Keane had two careers as a writer. She took up writing out of sheer boredom at seventeen when she was confined to bed with an illness in the early 1920s. She wrote as M J Farrell, a name she had seen over a pub door. She wanted to keep her writing secret as it would have been disapproved of in her social circle in Ireland: 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. 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.

In Jane Gardam’s elegant introduction to this beautiful Folio edition, she tells us about an episode when Molly Keane’s six-year-old daughter wanted to weep at the death of her father. Apparently Molly Keane told her child, ‘We mustn’t let [the butler] see us crying.’ It should be noted that Good Behaviour is not a thriller. Beginning with the title, it’s an ironic and often dark work. No one in this novel, set mostly in the first quarter of the twentieth century, behaves well; the bad behaviour is just hidden and generally imperceptible to Aroon, the naïve narrator of a story dealing with the decline of the Anglo-Irish landed class in general and Aroon’s family, the very dysfunctional St. Charleses, in particular. Athill, Diana (21 January 2017). "Diana Athill on Molly Keane: 'I admired many authors. But Molly, I loved' ". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 2 February 2023. 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. Good Behaviour takes us to familiar Molly Keane territory – among the impoverished Anglo-Irish aristocracy of the 1920’s and 30’s. However the story starts many years later – as our narrator Aroon St. Charles is making lunch for her difficult, ageing mother, watched over by their cook/housekeeper Rose – with whom Aroon does not get on well. I won’t say too much – although it is only the opening, short chapter, but it is a brilliant opening. We feel acutely the years of resentment of a disappointed life.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 A reviewer in The New York Times book review in August 1991 stated that Good Behaviour may well become "a classic among English Novels". It connected her in a personal way with the famous London editor, Diana Athill, who identified strongly with Keane after reading it, insisted on editing it herself, later calling the book "mindblowingly clever." [11] The St Charles family are hit by hard and changing times in 1920's Ireland. These are the dying days of Anglo-Irish aristocracy where appearances must be preserved and emotions muted and controlled. 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. Sally Phipps is Keane’s daughter, and, early on, remembers having a conversation with 90-year-old Molly amid the driftwood of her possessions, in Ardmore, County Waterford, Ireland. There was a question in the air (implied, if not directly asked): what had her life amounted to? Presumably, Keane encouraged this biography not only to settle the question, but because she wanted to spur on a daughter she would have known to be a born writer. Phipps was understandably uncertain about the undertaking – this, incredibly, is her first book – whereas Keane’s only fear was that the elder of her two daughters would not be “nasty enough”. Keane went on to suggest the biography be approached as though it were a novel – advice that has been partly, and brilliantly, followed.

Evidently this rule of ‘stiff upper lip’, ‘not in front of the servants’, always acting in accordance with social mores, was experienced, and to some extent, followed by Molly Keane. Perhaps this is why she examines it quite so expertly in this novel. It is from first-hand experience that she has created these characters who adhere so impeccably to the code of ‘Good Behaviour’, and yet, by creating these dark jolting interruptions to the otherwise well-behaved narrative flow, she challenges the code. The reader can’t help but see that some things deserve to be spoken about, ought to be grieved over, mustn’t be swept under the carpet.

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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. It wasn't a light novel. All that sadness and loneliness. Reading it hurt me and (because of it) I had been thinking (in the beginning) even of abandoning it, of not finishing it. Here, to my delight , Hubert and Richard danced with me in turn. I almost preferred dancing with Hubert because I loved showing off to Richard…I was fulfilled by them. I felt complete. There was no more to ask. Wow, this was really rather excellent. An author I’d not previously heard of, but a random episode of Between the Covers put me onto this 1981 Booker nominated novel. Thank you Sara Cox!