Molly Keane: Tender look at a literary life less ordinary
A warm and intimate portrait of a complex writer who captured, lucidly, the last twilight glimmer of a vanished world
Biography: Molly Keane: A Life, By Sally Phipps, Virago, €25
Molly Keane is now best remembered as the author of Good Behaviour (1981), perhaps the last of the great Irish “big-house novels” – a waspish comedy about a world on the edge of extinction. As the novelist Clare Boylan remarked: “Molly’s death [in 1996] closed the pages on Anglo-Irish literature. There are no more big houses. There will be no more big-house writers.”
