She wrote her first novel, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance (1926), at the age of seventeen, because she was ill and bored-and, she claimed, for money to buy dresses. Farrell, which she said she took from a sign she saw over the doorway of a pub she passed, returning from a hunt. It was the first of her works to appear under her real name her eleven earlier novels and several plays were published under the pseudonym M.J. Good Behaviour was published in 1981, when Keane was seventy-six. Even tragedy can wear the mask of the grotesque and absurd.

In Keane’s novels and plays, justice rarely triumphs, virtue is infrequently rewarded. Simultaneously light and dark, pleasurable and harrowing, Good Behaviour may appeal chiefly to readers drawn to characters who are a mixture of well-meaning and hilariously vile, victimizer and victim. After its dramatic start, the novel skips back to the early 1900s to tell Aroon’s tragicomic life story, tracking how her family and their “big house,” Temple Alice, change over the decades, mostly for the worse. I have come to depend on this brief précis-some people laugh, some don’t-to distinguish future fans of the book from readers who will be appalled. Mummie takes one whiff of the rabbit, vomits, and dies.Īll this occurs within the first four pages.

Aroon brings up the tray before Rose can intervene. Besides, she’ll say it’s chicken and Mummie will never know the difference. Aroon says that Mummie is fine with rabbit. Rose reminds Aroon that Mummie hates rabbit. Aroon has made rabbit quenelles for her elderly widowed mother, bedridden upstairs. Charles is arguing with Rose, the family cook. In the opening scene of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour, a novel about an Anglo-Irish household in the first half of the twentieth century, a fifty-seven-year-old woman named Aroon St. Molly Keane, Cappoquin, County Waterford, Ireland, circa 1939

Good behaviour molly keane summary