Molly Keane: Centenary Essays

by Molly Keane, Gwenda Young (Editor)

The 'Irish Big House' novelist, Molly Keane, was born in 1904, and in 2005 the Department of English at University College Cork will host an international conference. This book gathers these essays together to explore the writings of this important literary voice within twentieth-century Irish writing. Scholars of Irish literature from the US, Spain and Ireland presents perspectives on many aspects of her creative output, looking at a fascinating literary career which lasted from 1926 until 1993. This book draws together contemporary critical perspectives on this unique voice in Irish writing, the subversive voice of the Big House novelist charting the end of her class and the immanent collapse of a literary genre.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Molly Keane (20 July 1904 – 22 April 1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright (born Mary Nesta Skrine in Ryston Cottage, Newbridge, County Kildare). She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. She married Bobby Keane, one of a Waterford squirearchical family in 1938 and had two daughters. She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (Good Behaviour, Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote 11 novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M.J. Farrell . Molly was a member of Aosdána. Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and following the failure of a play she published nothing for twenty years. In 1981 Good Behaviour came out under her own name; the manuscript, which had languished in a drawer for many years, was lent to a visitor, the actress Peggy Ashcroft, who encouraged Keane to publish it. The novel was warmly received and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

After the death of her husband, Molly Keane moved to Ardmore, County Waterford, a place she knew well, and lived there with her two daughters, Sally and Virginia, until she died in 1996. She is buried beside the Church of Ireland church, almost in the centre of the village.

(from Wikipedia)