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The Bloomsbury Hotel, London WC1B 3NN
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This event brings together the poets Thomas McCarthy and Virginia Keane Brownlow in conversation with Dorothy Allen to reflect on the life and writing of Molly Keane.
Molly Keane was born Molly Skrine in Co Kildare in 1904, part of what she herself described as “a rather serious hunting, fishing church going family”. Her mother, Moira O’Neill was a well known writer, called the “Poetess of the Glens” and Keane herself published The Knights of Cheerful Countenance in 1926 when she was just seventeen.
She used the name of M.J Farrell as a pen name, reputedly a name she had taken from a pub she spotted one day while out hunting. For Keane, the male name became a screen for her literary work, a necessary self protection within the distinctly unliterary anti-intellectual hunting world of the Anglo-Irish in the 1920’s.
Comic novels like Young Entry, (1928), Mad Puppetstown, (1931), Devoted Ladies (1934) and Full House, (1935) established her reputation, as did her most dramatic novel of the Irish war of Independence, Two Days in Aragon, published in 1941.
At the same time, Molly Keane was also a successful dramatist in London’s West End, working with John Gielgud between 1938 and 1961 to produce a series of commercial hits.
After the death of her husband and the failure of a play in 1961, Molly Keane moved back to Ardmore, Co Waterford with her two daughters and gave up writing as M.J. Farrell.
Finally, in 1981, she published, under her own name, the novel that is considered her masterpiece, Good Behaviour and found new inspiration as a novelist in her old age with later novels such as Time After Time, (1983) and Loving and Giving (1988). Molly Keane died in 1996.