At the risk of a spoiler, poor clueless Aroon spends her life devoted to her "lover" blind to the pathos of her ignorance to the end. Charles, 57, murdering her mother with a rabbit mousse - this is no spoiler, it happens in the first pages. She rented out her house to English friends fleeing socialism; for a time she took a wing of the Keane cousins’ mansion at Cappoquin House, until there was a falling out over money; when she had a windfall from her play Treasure Hunt (1949), she bought a bungalow by the sea, renovated and extended it.

And although part of me wants to know only the other (nicer) site, such novels like 'Good Behaviour' are a must-read for all who like to read about those times. I wish I could stop reading books that are really just about people wanting to see themselves a certain way and everyone and everything else in the world is about supporting that self vision. Mrs Brock is, naturally, immediately dismissed, and soon arrives in Ireland to corrupt the children at Temple Alice. Her insistence on having things her own way in that first chapter as well as some of the events in it make her decidedly unappealing. Her sixth novel, Devoted Ladies (1934), features gay and lesbian characters modeled after the theater types she’d met at the home of her bisexual friend John Perry, and it marks a major break from her earlier novels, heralding a more mature phase.

Aroon brings up the prettily arranged tray to the patient who lies on the prettily arranged pillows in a prettily redecorated room. In Two Days in Aragon the story of the hat-box baby is refigured: the river is an abortionist’s graveyard ‘where babies’ bones were little and green scattered skeletons on the river bottom’.

The problem with Mrs Brock is that she not only has feelings of her own, and expresses them, but cultivates them in others, especially in her charges. She didn’t really like children; she didn’t like dogs either, and she had no enjoyment of food, for she ate almost nothing.

Coal merchants and butchers could both be difficult, so days of farm labour were spent felling and cutting up trees – the wood burned up quickly and delightfully in the high fast-draughting Georgian grates. In 1938 she had met and married Bobbie Keane, a gentleman farmer and keen huntsman, becoming mistress of her own Georgian house and garden near Cappoquin in County Waterford. Ah, Ann Daly was a whack-hand at any business like that, and the river is handy for any little things that you wouldn’t want to be keeping. The next three books show Keane stretching herself in style and experimenting with darker subjects: Full House (1935) introduces the first of many monstrous mothers; The Rising Tide (1937), her best novel barring Good Behaviour, is an acid melodrama about a widow clinging to her Edwardian youth; and Two Days in Aragon (1941) takes on the Irish War of Independence, house-burning and all.

A superb comic creation, Mrs Brock is a middle-class widow, given to playing the piano, knitting, and falling in love with her employers. She was eventually packed off to a French boarding school in Bray, where she was miserable (‘unlinked and unloved’), but where she discovered Proust. This was Molly Keane’s first book in which she used her real name…prior books by her used the pseudonym of M. Her career led to collaborations and lasting friendships with John Gielgud and a trio of redoubtable Dames: Margaret Rutherford, Sybil Thorndyke, and Peggy Ashcroft.I have lived for the people dearest to me, and I am at a loss to know why their lives have been at times so perplexingly unhappy. It was a deeply sad letter, being such a clear indication that the end was near, but it was also a wonderfully generous gift.

She stays on alone with Patsy, the kitchen boy, surviving on game and eventually piling all the furniture into one room so they can light a single fire. G. Farrell, who had won the Booker in 1973 with The Siege of Krishnapur, but it’s easy to see why Farrell’s surreal and witty portrait of postwar Anglo-Ireland in Troubles (1970) would have looked like literary kin, and Keane may well have enjoyed being promoted to the head of this arch Irish lineage.The book was shortlisted for the 1981 Booker Prize which was eventually won by Salman Rushdie with “Midnight’s Children”. Layering Aroon’s past and present points of view with those of characters who haven’t yet been introduced, Keane masterfully reveals the coexistence in Aroon of deep, instinctual knowledge and willful ignorance.