The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996), [1] née Mary Nesta Skrine, and who also wrote as M. J. Farrell, was an Irish novelist and playwright. In Jane Gardam’s elegant introduction to this beautiful Folio edition, she tells us about an episode when Molly Keane’s six-year-old daughter wanted to weep at the death of her father. Apparently Molly Keane told her child, ‘We mustn’t let [the butler] see us crying.’ Keane has set herself a technical challenge. She must make us see all the things that Aroon doesn’t see. . . . There are many moments of brilliant, farcical comedy. . . . Keane’s prose roils with affect denied but persistently, pungently alive. Daddy serves as a lord of the decaying manor figure. As long as there are horses, and money to keep those up, it's all good. He'd probably be called a sexual compulsive today, but as long as Mummy doesn't have to Do It, again it's all good. The Dead nanny who hovers over the story underscores all that.

Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. Though she herself tells the tale, we somehow see her morality’s disastrous consequences. Hilarious and sinister.” I am again in the darkness of the nursery, the curtains drawn against the winter morning outside. Nannie is dragging on her corsets under her great nightdress. Baby Hubert is walking up and down his cot in a dirty nightdress. The nursery maid is pouring paraffin on a sulky nursery fire. I fix my eyes on the strip of morning light where wooden rings join curtains to curtain pole and think about my bantams . . . Even then I knew to ignore things. I knew how to behave. The St Charles family are hit by hard and changing times in 1920's Ireland. These are the dying days of Anglo-Irish aristocracy where appearances must be preserved and emotions muted and controlled.This is one of those books where you really cannot trust the narrator. There must be many others like this, and I’d like to hear from other GR folks what books they can think of that come to mind regarding this genre – unreliable narrators of a story who tell their side of things and it’s distorted from what really happened. I read a fave book this year for the second time, A Debt to Pleasure (John Lanchester, 1996 – 1996 Whitbread Book Award in the First Novel category) …. that book, too, had an unreliable and devious narrator (Tarquin Winor). This was Molly Keane’s first book in which she used her real name…prior books by her used the pseudonym of M.J. Farrell. I do not know how old she was when she wrote this – in the preface Amy Gentry tells us that “Keane’s publisher of nearly fifty years rejected it, saying it was too nasty and suggesting she write at least one “nice” character. She refused. It sat in a drawer for years until her friend the actor Peggy Ashcroft read it during a visit and urged Keane to try again.” It got published in 1981…Keane was nearly 80 years old. The mother of the heroine must save money, well, it is commendable, except when "Her final objective was penance for all of us. She wanted everyone to suffer."

Virtually uneducated, and by her own account ignored at home, as a young woman Molly effectively found herself a second family with the Perrys of County Tipperary. Their son, John Perry, was subsequently to co-author with her four plays that ran in the West End, with varying success, for over a decade. At the Perrys’, Molly met Bobby Keane, four years her junior and with whom she lived, unconventionally, for five years before they married. Her husband’s premature death in 1946 left her a penurious mother of two. It is widely believed that she fell silent for the following thirty years. In fact, Loving without Tears was published in 1951 and offers a full flavour of Molly Keane. Then, as the reading progresses, as it is well done and well written, I end up letting myself go, although the characters remain bogged down in their inactive miserableness: It should be noted that Good Behaviour is not a thriller. Beginning with the title, it’s an ironic and often dark work. No one in this novel, set mostly in the first quarter of the twentieth century, behaves well; the bad behaviour is just hidden and generally imperceptible to Aroon, the naïve narrator of a story dealing with the decline of the Anglo-Irish landed class in general and Aroon’s family, the very dysfunctional St. Charleses, in particular. Keane has set herself a technical challenge. She must make us see all the things that Aroon doesn’t see. . . . There are many moments of brilliant, farcical comedy. . . . Keane’s prose roils with affect denied but persistently, pungently alive.”Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them. We kept our heads above the morass, stifled screaming despairs only by the exercise of good behaviour.” But Keane could also be wounding. An unnamed friend remembers “darts thrown with extraordinary lethal accuracy like the banderoles of a skilled picador”. And Phipps does not omit the darts aimed in her direction: her mother need not have worried that she would be too nice – this biography is animated by kindness, but never at the expense of truth. Athill, Diana (21 January 2017). "Diana Athill on Molly Keane: 'I admired many authors. But Molly, I loved' ". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 2 February 2023. What follows is a believable story of a dysfunctional family. They are part of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy falling into decline after the First War and the Irish Independance wars in the early part of the 20th century - although there is not a single reference to this important political event in Irish history.