276°
Posted 20 hours ago

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

£4.995£9.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Information For Writers and Producers of Radio Drama". Archived from the original on 25 September 2005 . Retrieved 16 September 2006. 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’’. 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 from its horrors.

Between 1926 and 1952, Keane wrote 11 novels, as well as a number of successful plays. Her career led to collaborations and lasting friendships with John Gielgud and a trio of redoubtable Dames: Margaret Rutherford, Sybil Thorndyke, and Peggy Ashcroft. But the unexpected death of her beloved husband Bobby Keane in 1946 all but drowned her urge to create. Kierstead, Mary D. (13 October 1986). "Profiles: A great old breakerawayer". The New Yorker. Vol.62, no.34. pp.97–112. 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. Our reading experience was one where we were continually held at arm's length from the main character, and yet there are multiple occasions when we could have been drawn in. Time and again Aroon defies us to feel pity or even empathy.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 ] Her two subsequent novels – Time After Time and Loving and Giving – were less brilliant than Good Behaviour. Although Time After Time was wonderfully entertaining and Loving and Giving was perhaps the most amazing thing she ever did, considering her age and frailty at the time she wrote it. David Higham Client Entry". Archived from the original on 1 September 2006 . Retrieved 16 September 2006. Certain extended scenes are unforgettable, as when Richard, Aroon’s fantasy lover—but in fact her brother’s preferred bedmate—spends the night in her room to deflect attention from the men’s true relationship. (Spoiler: nothing happens.) We nearly weep benighted Aroon, despite her inarguable flaws. There was just one occasion when I spent real time with her, and it was then that admiration turned into love.

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. 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: Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them. Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996), [1] née Mary Nesta Skrine, and who also wrote as M. J. Farrell, was an Irish novelist and playwright. Maggie O’Farrell (Jim: so close to her pseudonym!): Nobody else can touch Molly Keane as a satirist, tragedian, and dissector of human behavior.It’s the gap between what Aaron knows and understands and what we as readers understand that makes Good Behaviour such a tremendous book. Added to that Keane’s characters are wholly believable; none of them come across in flattering way. They wouldn’t dream of treating their dogs or horses badly yet are perfectly capable of being mean and spiteful to fellow humans in revenge for personal grievances whether real or imagined. That doesn’t mean this is a novel entirely devoid of humour. There is a wonderful set piece towards the end of the novel where Aaron, on the morning of her father’s funeral is despatched to the station to collect one of his old friends.She lets herself be persuaded to take a tipple in the station buffet – one brand and ginger ale turns into two and three and then she falls on the ice and spends the afternoon sleeping it off while everyone else is at the funeral. But Keane suddenly turns from humour to pathos as Aaron realises she has “let the side down”. So, no, definitely, no, I didn't like Molly Keane's characters, including the young Aroon. I only enjoy reading stories, real or fictional, about characters who raise themselves and raise me with them. I must not reveal how now one blow falls after another - upon the family and upon Aroon in particular. She does her best to cope; she has a need to help and to be needed, to love and to be loved; but, as before, she often feels hurtfully excluded. She suffers one humiliation after another - and again good behaviour means that she must not show it. 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. 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.

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”. We communicated mostly by letter, meeting only briefly on her infrequent visits to London, and I accompanied her to the Booker prize dinner in 1981, when Good Behaviour was shortlisted. We kept telling each other to suppress excitement, because Salman Rushdie was “going to get it”, which he did. Molly kept her cool, but judging by my own disappointment, hers must have been horrible. Yes, the young Aroon had parents who should never have been parents. Yes, she has a physique that does not meet the beauty criteria of her time. Yes, she was not loved. I had the satisfaction of knowing that she was less happy and therefore that I was more important."It might remind us of the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, that too is something dressed as another by the story being told. You have all the right to smile and laugh at the stories but remember that these stories are being used in our daily lives as well and we have to be careful to separate what we are actually seeing from the stories being 'told'. The title is important and Kean has a way of using words effectively to put across a feeling with sinister undertones: 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. Virtually uneducated, and by her own account ignored at home, as a young woman Molly effectively found herself a second family with the Perrys of County Tipperary. Their son, John Perry, was subsequently to co-author with her four plays that ran in the West End, with varying success, for over a decade. At the Perrys’, Molly met Bobby Keane, four years her junior and with whom she lived, unconventionally, for five years before they married. Her husband’s premature death in 1946 left her a penurious mother of two. It is widely believed that she fell silent for the following thirty years. In fact, Loving without Tears was published in 1951 and offers a full flavour of Molly Keane.

Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them.” Keane’s publisher of nearly fifty years rejected it, saying it was too nasty and suggesting she write at least one “nice” character. She refused. It sat in a drawer for years until her friend the actor Peggy Ashcroft read it during a visit and urged Keane to try again. Published to instant acclaim in 1981, it was nominated for the Booker Prize but lost to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. She was nearly eighty years old. It was her first book published under her real name.

More episodes

for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm: I would have been banned from every respectable house in Co. Carlow."

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment