Novelist Molly Keane dies at 92

THE novelist and playwright Molly Keane died early yesterday at her home at Ardmore, Co Waterford. She was 92.

The author of 14 novels and four plays published under the pseudonym M.J. Farrell during the period 1928 to 1961, Ms Keane resumed her career as a published author in 1981 with the comic novel Good Behaviour. It was short listed for the Booker Prize.

Good Behaviour was the first work to be published under her own name.

Born in Co Kildare in 1904 into what she described as "a rather serious hunting and fishing, church going family", she was educated by governesses.

She published her first novel, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance, at 17 in order, she said, to supplement her dress allowance. Her pseudonym was inspired by the name of a pub she had seen "as I rode home", and was used to "hide my literary side from my sporting friends".

The critic and humourist James Agate, praising her plays, said: "I would back this impish writer to hold her own against Noel Coward himself."

Her plays were all directed by John Gielgud.

The gap in her career was caused by the sudden death of her husband, Bobby Keane, who died when he was aged 36.

The couple had two daughters, Mrs Sally Phibbs and Mrs Virginia Brownlow. Both were with their mother when she died, according to Ms Keane's London agent, Ms Gina Pollinger. The novelist had fallen and broke a hip two months ago, and had been operated on, Ms Pollinger said. She died peacefully in her home.

According to Polly Devlin, in the 1991 Virago edition of the novel, Conversation Piece, Molly Keane, as M.J. Farrell "wrote, on the whole, of the lives, preoccupations and pastimes of that moneyed, hunting, curiously, dislocated class of people in Ireland, the Anglo Irish, skipping over the political angry geographical reality that was Ireland in the first quarter of this century."

Her novels "deliver a remarkable and vivid social history, an impeccably observed occasionally delinquent record, full of relevance and revelation of a way of life and a vanished world that has not otherwise been given its due recognition in the country where it existed."

Ms Keane started writing Good Behaviour in the 1970s when "the children had grown up and I was doing nothing", according to an interview published in the 1991 Virago edition of Conversation Piece.

It was when the actress Peggy Ashcroft was staying with her, and was in bed with the flu, that Ms Keane gave her a copy of the manuscript of Good Behaviour, which had already been once rejected. "I know it's absolutely ghastly," Ms Keane had said.

"And, you know, she was absolutely crazy about it, thought it was wonderful."

Time after Time was published in 1983 and Loving and Giving in 1988. Time After Time was filmed for television. Her cookery book, Nursery Cooking, was published in 1985.

Molly Keane was a member of Aosdana since its inception in 1981. Aosdana and the Arts Council, in a joint statement, said it was with "great sadness" that they had learned of the writer's death.

Mr Adrian Munnelly, director of the Arts Council, said: "It is of particular sadness that within one month Ireland has lost two of its greatest women writers, Mary Lavin and now Molly Keane. Their passing is our great loss."