I Have Come To Understand Her In A Way I Found Difficult In Real Life

Sally Phipps describes the sometimes strange process of writing the biography of her mother, the Anglo-Irish novelist Molly Keane.

My sister Virginia and I sat at the kitchen table, listening to a recording of my mother, Molly Keane, talking after her death. It was a light, Irish Ascendancy voice, charming, thoughtful and slightly shy – sometimes with a note of sharpness or laughter behind it.

It was emotional for us to hear her, speaking from beyond the grave, but what she said was so interesting that we became absorbed in it. She seemed to be addressing us directly, as though she were still here. She was actually talking to a very skilled interviewer, John Bowman, who asked her the sort of questions that caused her to stop, think and answer with simplicity and honesty.

She was not a natural interviewee and could easily become nervy and say things she didn’t really mean. He questioned her about her approach to writing, which, at other times, she sometimes pretended not to take seriously. But, in this case, she spoke as though it was the most important thing in her life, which in many ways it was.

It had been an interrupted writing life. She wrote her first novel in 1926, when she was 22, and kept on writing for 35 years, when she gave up after her play Dazzling Prospect flopped in 1961. After a twenty-year gap, she returned to writing with a late-life hit, Good Behaviour, aged 75, in 1981. Keane had previously written under the male pen name M J Farrell – because, in her youth, ‘for a woman to read a book, let alone write one, was viewed with alarm’. Only with the publication of Good Behaviour did she have the confidence to publish under her real name. By the time she died, in 1996, aged 91, at her Waterford home, she was hailed as a significant novelist.