Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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The character of Rose isn’t offered as a vehicle for self-expression, growth, a life story – all the ingredients of fiction. Aroon brings up the prettily arranged tray to the patient who lies on the prettily arranged pillows in a prettily redecorated room. Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright (born Mary Nesta Skrine in Ryston Cottage, Newbridge, County Kildare). Bowen’s novel is also gloriously stylised, but she takes as her model Shakespearean comedy, with postwar rural Ireland standing in for the Forest of Arden, rather than satire. I stepped up to my reflection, then away from it, and I could find only surprise and delight in what I saw.

Once back at Ballyrankin, however, she contracted a mysterious illness that her biographer, her daughter Sally Phipps, suggests may have been psychosomatic. A real work of craftsmanship, where the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on. Virago use her a lot and the larger than life/world is less frame of girls in their places just felt so Good Behaviour and big girl Aroon to me. She longed for affection from her chilly, withdrawn mother, a celebrated poet of sentimental verse, but struggled to embody her Victorian ideals of modesty and composure.

I admired the way Molly Keane was able to ridicule all our human foibles while maintaining a certain sympathy for her characters on the part of the reader. Mummy hides the bills in a drawer, focusing on what she might get with the money to beautify her own life instead.

It started to feel like being with them too long every time something happened like Papa and brother infecting their society with jokes about Big Girl Aroon. She is right, of course, but her assertion that ‘the heroine is also the narrator, yet has no idea what is going on’ seems wide of the mark. Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. In her tender but unsentimental memoir ( Molly Keane: A Life), Keane’s daughter, Sally Phipps, reports that her mother discouraged some friends from reading the book, certain that they’d hate it.Animals, food and her brother are her consolation, her mother rarely responds even when Aroon reports that she thinks her baby brother is dead, she enquires where the staff are. I stood about, smiling, compressed, submerged in politeness; aching in my isolation; longing to be alone; to be away; to be tomorrow’s person … But there was no respite from the party that flowed round me. Aroon picks her mother’s hand (‘limp as a dead duck’s neck’) out of the sick and puts it down on a clean place.