It was the era of the “Big House,” the grand manors of the landed gentry owned by Protestant families and serviced by the Catholic “underclass.” But tables turned during the Irish uprising Keane’s family manse, Ballyrankin, built in the 18th century, was burned to the ground by armed rebels while she was in boarding school. The diminishing power, wealth, and influence of the Anglo-Irish suffuses Keane’s novels, and often served as a backdrop to lives largely spent avoiding hard truths riding, hunting, fishing, and partying in defiance of their impending doom was the norm. (Her father, an Englishman, stubbornly resisted those who urged him to move his family to his homeland to avoid the violence.) The Keane family were Anglo-Irish, Protestants among Catholics, whose ongoing political conflicts boiled over in the War of Irish Independence during Keane’s childhood. 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. 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.
When Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour was first published in 1981, the author was 76.
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