Bad behaviour

Molly Keane achieved fame and critical acclaim in 1981 aged 75, when she published the novel Good Behaviour, a razor-sharp social comedy about the Anglo-Irish in the 1930s. Her success was the more sensational because it was unexpected. Twenty years previously her play Dazzling Prospect had flopped disastrously at the box office. A drawing-room farce in the era of the kitchen sink, it seemed so dated that Kenneth Tynan remarked that he could hear horses whinnying in the audience. Convinced that her writing career was finished, Keane had published nothing since. She wrote Good Behaviour in secret, for herself. When her friend the publisher Billy Collins turned it down as too dark, she put it away in a drawer. But then Peggy Ashcroft came to stay and, in bed with flu, she asked to see the typescript and urged Molly to publish.

Molly Keane wrote her first novel, a Mills & Boon romance, when she was 22. Anxious to avoid being seen as clever — a certain way of frightening off the men of her acquaintance — she adopted a pseudonym, M.J. Farrell. She spotted the name while out hunting one day over the door of a pub. This book by her daughter Sally Phipps is a family memoir — the story of the woman behind the name M.J. Farrell.

Molly grew up in the world of the Anglo-Irish big house. Her own family, the Skrines, lived in a gloomy, puritanical house which Molly nicknamed the Bogs. Her mother was a disapproving Ulsterwoman, a depressed poetess who translated Dante and wrote verse under the name of Moira O’Neill. Molly found her especially trying, and escaped as soon as she could. Fleeing the Skrine diet of rabbits and custard pie, she took up with a smart, social family who lived in a mansion nearby.