Good Behaviour

Heroine and deluded narrator Aroon St Charles understands nothing, yet reveals everything, in this wickedly dark comedy from Molly Keane.

Behind the gates of Temple Alice the aristocratic Anglo-Irish St Charles family sinks into a state of decaying grace. To Aroon St Charles, large and unlovely daughter of the house, the fierce forces of sex, money, jealousy and love seem locked out by the ritual patterns of good behaviour. But crumbling codes of conduct cannot hope to save the members of the St Charles family from their own unruly and inadmissible desires.

"In Keane’s novels and plays, justice rarely triumphs, and virtue is infrequently rewarded. Even tragedy can wear the mask of the grotesque and absurd ... Keane acutely captures the loneliness of a young person in a world of propriety where so much goes unspoken ... Aroon St. Charles is Molly Keane’s great creation, Good Behaviour her masterpiece."  -  Francine Prose, The New York Review Of Books

Molly Keane was an Irish novelist and playwright. Hailed as the Irish Nancy Mitford in her day; as well as writing books she was the leading playwright of the 1930s, with her work directed by John Gielgud. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote 11 novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M.J. Farrell. In 1981, aged 70, she published Good Behaviour - her most famous work - and which had languished in a drawer for many years.