Keane, Molly (1904–1996)

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Keane, Molly (1904–1996)

Irish novelist and playwright whose Good Behaviour, published when she was 77, won the Booker Prize. Name variations: Mary Nesta Skrine; (pseudonym) M.J. Farrell. Born Mary Nesta (Molly) Skrine in County Kildare, Ireland, on July 20, 1904; died at Ardmore, County Waterford, on April 22, 1996; third of five children of Walter Clermont Skrine and Agnes Shakespeare Higginson Skrine (who wrote under the pseudonym Moira O'Neill); educated privately and at French School, Bray, County Wicklow; married Robert Lumley Keane, in October 1938 (died, October 7, 1946); children: Sally Keane; Virginia Keane.

Awards:

honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland and the University of Ulster; elected member of Aosdána (1981); Booker Prize (1981).

Selected writings:

Devoted Ladies (1934, new ed., Virago, 1984); Two Days in Aragon (1941, new ed., Virago, 1985); Good Behaviour (Deutsch, 1981); Time after Time (Deutsch, 1983); Loving and Giving (Deutsch, 1988).

Molly Keane came from a landed, wealthy Anglo-Irish gentry family and lived through a turbulent period between 1914 and 1923 when the comfortable world of the Anglo-Irish Big House was drawing to a close with the establishment of the new Irish state in 1922. It was a world of paradox, as her writings were to illustrate with their portraits of an Anglo-Irish society insulated within its gracious 18th-century houses, obsessed with horses and hunting and, for the most part, cheerfully philistine. Her father Walter Skrine cared only for his horses while her mother Agnes Skrine , a poet and literary reviewer who wrote under the pseudonym Moira O'Neill, preferred to live in her own 19th-century world. "You can't think how neglected we were by our parents," Molly later observed. "I mean, they didn't do anything with us at all, they simply didn't bother. They were utterly reclusive.… My father was a very remote figure to me as a child. He just didn't enter my life very much and when he did it was a dreadful chore." Although she later confessed that she fought constant battles with her mother, nonetheless she was very fond of her: "She had a sort of 'star quality' even though I didn't see a great deal of her." Horses and riding were very important to the young Molly, "It was the only thing that counted." But in the society she moved in, literature was quite a different matter as she later recounted. "For a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm. I would have been banned from every respectable house."

This was the main reason Molly and her mother used pseudonyms. Molly wrote under the name M.J. Farrell (adopted from a public

house sign) when she eventually started to write at the end of the 1920s. She said she wrote because she needed pin-money to finance her social life, but she had also been profoundly influenced by her friendship with the Perry family who lived at Woodrooff in County Tipperary and with whom she stayed for long periods. The Perrys were cultured and well-read and the son of the house, John Perry, had close connections with the London theater. Molly sold her first novel, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance (1928), for $350. Her second book, Young Entry, was bought for $500 and published in 1928. Her early novels, as Ann Owens Weekes observed, "combine wit, alert intelligence, and willingness to broach controversial subjects." In Devoted Ladies (1934) she dealt with lesbianism in fashionable London. However, despite the seriousness of the theme, Keane enjoyed poking fun at herself when her character Jessica scolds the heroine Jane for reading Young Entry: "It's full of the lowing of hounds and everyone stuffing themselves with buttermilk scones dripping with butter. Plenty of picturesque discomfort and cold bath water and those incredible Irish mountains always in the distance."

In 1938, the year of her marriage to Robert Keane, Molly embarked on the first of a successful playwriting collaboration with her old friend John Perry. Spring Meeting ran successfully in London and New York and was followed by Ducks and Drakes (1941), Guardian Angel (1944), Treasure Hunt (1949) and Dazzling Prospects (1961); with the exception of Guardian Angel (which was produced in Dublin), each of these plays was directed by John Gielgud, a close friend. After the late 1930s, Molly wrote comparatively few novels of which Two Days in Aragon (1941) was the most important and which prefigured the darker themes of her last three great novels of the 1980s.

The years after the Second World War were more uncertain for Keane. Her husband died suddenly, leaving her with two small daughters to bring up. Her postwar plays and novels were less successful and the hostile reaction to her last play with Perry, Dazzling Prospects, prompted her to give up writing in 1961. She retired to Ireland. The appearance of Good Behaviour in 1981, published under her own name when she was 77 and which won the Booker Prize, caused considerable surprise (many people thought she was dead). In her study of the last three novels, Good Behaviour, Time After Time (1983) and Loving and Giving (1988), Vera Kreilkamp calls them "darkly comic explorations of individual delusion" which "represent a new and corrosive dissection of the [Anglo-Irish] society she had previously evoked with occasional nostalgia." Keane's Anglo-Irish gentry were now portrayed as insulated from history; their exquisite good manners disguised the vacuity of their lives; and the men—fathers, brothers and husbands—have become ciphers in the dynamics of family power which have now shifted decisively to the women—Aroon St Charles in Good Behaviour, the Swift sisters in Time after Time and Nicandra in Loving and Giving—who were expected to sacrifice themselves on the altar of the Big House and family interests.

Recognition for Keane came in 1981 when she was one of the first writers elected to Aosdána, an affiliation of Irish artists who receive state subsidies. This ensured her an income for the rest of her life. There were successful television adaptations of Good Behaviour and Time after Time in 1983 and 1986. The exclusion of Keane from the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991), supposedly because of hostility to her Big House theme, aroused some controversy and, as Kreilkamp points out, ignored the way Keane had subverted the genre. Keane, one suspects, was quietly amused.