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An introduction to the fiction of Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell)
Abstract
Molly Keane began writing stylish witty novels in the 1920's under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell. The Anglo-Irish society which she was born into was receding to a distant vanishing point in the memories of the last survivors. As a young writer Keane sensed that this was a unique culture that was worth writing about and she did so in fourteen novels and four plays over a sixty-year career. This dissertation is intended to be a general introduction to Keane's fiction, examining the novels in chronological sequence, identifying the controlling ideas, literary techniques and image patterns. The author's work is considered in the context of the Irish Big House novel. Keane's early romance novels focus on the thrill of the fox hunt as much as the thrill of young love. But in the 1930's her novels take on a darker hue. Her wit becomes more pungent and her irony more penetrating. The powerful figure of the cruel matriarch emerges and casts a shadow over those Ascendancy families living in decaying splendor. In the 1940's Keane widened her audience, writing country house farces for London's West End. Then at the high point of her popularity she was left a widow with two children. She eventually stopped writing and didn't produce another novel for thirty years. Good Behavior, a finalist for the Booker Prize in 1981, launched Keane on a successful return to the literary scene as an octogenarian. As Vera Kreilkamp and other critics have pointed out, Keane is not merely elegizing the lost golden age of a culture, rather she is expressing with measured compassion and irony the arrogance and improvidence of a doomed aristocracy. Keane exposes, with a certain spite and malice, the cruelty and heartlessness that often passes as "good behavior." Furthermore, the author records with an insider's perception the tensions that prevailed within families as well as between the Anglo-Irish gentry and the subject Catholic population. Her writing captures the texture and the taste of a carefully designed life-style, one that bore the seeds of its own destruction.
Subject Area
British and Irish literature
Recommended Citation
Gibbs, Katherine Lilly, "An introduction to the fiction of Molly Keane (M. J. Farrell)" (1993). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9322796.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9322796