Molly Keane: Manners, men and matricide

In her new book, Eating Myself, Candida Crewe recalls a night she spent with Molly Keane, at the writer's home, west of Cork, in 1993. Keane, almost 90 at the time, discouraged Crewe from having pudding at supper. It was just in case, she said, Crewe put on weight and subsequently put her husband off her.

It's maybe not an anecdote to endear her to a modern, post-feminist audience, but for anyone familiar with Molly Keane's novels, it sounds like just the kind of barbed, ironic remark she would have made. Beneath the sparkling façade of Thirties Anglo-Irish life that she portrayed in so many of her novels, lay the dark, bitter truths which have induced critics to liken her to Noel Coward and Jane Austen, and which earned her a Booker nomination in 1981.

Confident that we will still appreciate the woman who dared to portray a lesbian relationship in her 1934 novel, Devoted Ladies (only six years after Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness was banned as obscene) as well as an attempted abortion in her 1929 novel, Taking Chances, and who restarted her literary career after a 20-year interval with a novel that began with an act of matricide, Virago have decided to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Keane's death by reprinting five of her best-loved books in stylish Art Deco covers, which rather belie the dubious contents within. Marian Keyes, Polly Devlin, Michèle Roberts and Emma Donoghue provide the introductions. Two of these novels are from the 1930s, when Keane wrote under the pseudonym of M J Farrell (to supplement her dress allowance, so she claimed): The Rising Tide and Devoted Ladies. Her last three novels were all published in the 1980s, under her own name: the Booker-nominated Good Behaviour, Loving and Giving and Time After Time.

Molly Keane was born Molly Skrine, in County Kildare in 1904, to a typical Anglo-Irish huntin', shootin', fishin' father, who cared more about horses than anything else in the world, and a rather atypical poet mother, Moira O'Neill, who was known then as "the Poet of the Seven Glens", and who didn't seem to have much time for her youngest child either. As was the custom with this privileged but increasingly impoverished set, Keane was educated at home by a series of governesses, in the face of declining income, then sent on to boarding-school, an experience which she loathed ("My unpopularity, that went to the edge of dislike, drove me into myself," she recalled years later).

When she returned home, she found that her relationship with her mother had scarcely improved after all the time apart ("my mother didn't really like me and the aunts were ghastly to me and my father had absolutely nothing to do with me") and so she went to live with family friends, the Perrys in County Tipperary. It was while staying with them that she met Bobby Keane, with whom she lived for six years before marrying and bearing him two daughters. His early death in 1938 devastated her, although it did not stop her writing, as many have claimed. It was the failure of her play, Dazzling Prospect, in 1961, which did this, leading to the famous 20-year hiatus before the triumphant appearance of Good Behaviour.

Keane published her first book, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance, at the tender age of 17, something she kept hidden from her hunting-set friends, who disapproved of anything literary ("For a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm; I would have been banned from every respectable house in County Carlow," she said once in an interview with Polly Devlin in 1983). Perhaps more surprisingly, she also kept her writing a secret from her parents. She would say later that she doubted either her father or her mother had ever read a word she'd written, even once they found about her work, which seems extraordinary when her own mother was a published poet.

This distant relationship Keane had with her mother crops up again and again in her fiction, although critical attention tends to focus more to her status as a chronicler of life in "the Big House". This was an Anglo-Irish genre of fiction (a genre which also includes Elizabeth Bowen) in which "the Big House" operated as a metaphor for the decline of the wealthy Protestant class as the ruling elite, through the depiction of the grand country family seat sliding into disrepair and eventual abandonment. But it's an association which has tended to see Keane primarily as, at worst a simple, popular marker of class, or at best, a satiriser of a particular set of people, when in fact she is a remarkably honest, some would say brutally so, explorer of relationships. And the first, and most important, of these is the relationship between a mother and daughter.

Mother-daughter stories were all the rage when Keane first picked up her pen, although she was not aware of it at the time. In England, May Sinclair, Radclyffe Hall, Antonia White and E M Delafield were all writing about difficult, often impossible relationships that daughters were having with their mothers, while in the US, Olive Higgins Prouty and Edith Wharton made the subject central to many of their stories. It was a theme that grew out of its time - the inter-war years - when a degree of independence that had been experienced by women during the Great War was thwarted by calls home when the war came to an end. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about her own mother-in-law and her domestic requirements: "so vampire-like and vast in her demand for my entire attention and sympathy... Lord! How many daughters have been murdered by women like this!"

Molly Keane repeatedly portrayed troubled mother-daughter relationships, from Full House and The Rising Tide in the 1930s to Good Behaviour and Loving and Giving in the 1980s. In The Rising Tide, Lady Charlotte McGrath's control over her four daughters is overt, as is made clear to us right at the beginning: "Lady Charlotte French McGrath mounting the stairs in her daughters' wake was a shocking despot, really swollen with family conceit and a terrifying pride of race. She had a strange sense of her own power, made real indeed by a life at Garonlea with her obedient husband, frightened children and many tenants and dependants." Keane's portrayal of the "monstrous" Lady Olivia Bird in Full House, however, shows a vain and selfish woman who makes her children compete for her affection, with a kind of passive-aggressive cruelty that almost destroys her daughter, Sheena. Both women keep a stranglehold on their children, selfishly using them to answer their own need for power.

It was a more distant and distasteful type, however, that Keane created 30 years later, when she portrayed the icy and cruel "Maman" in Loving and Giving, who is having an affair with one of the "Big House" workers. It is 1914, and she is spotted by her eight-year-old daughter Nicandra on her way to see him. Later, she punishes her child by tying her to a chair and forcing her to eat the spinach that she hates, before eloping with her lover. As in so many of these cases, the "Big House" is associated directly with the mother so that when she falls into a decline, or leaves, so the house itself begins literally to fall apart. After killing her mother at the start of Good Behaviour, Aroon St Charles depicts in flashback the dislike her mother always showed her, a woman who seemed to delight in humiliating and mocking her only daughter. Her illness and loss of power over her daughter is similarly linked to the decline of the house that Aroon, ironically, has inherited from her father.

Even Devoted Ladies, while apparently delineating the vicious nature of a lesbian relationship between bullying Jessica and silly, simpering Jane, has something of the mother-daughter power struggle about it, as Jane attempts to free herself from Jessica's possessive and often abusive hold over her by marrying the dull but solid George Playfair. Right up to the end, Jessica insists Jane will stay with her, even if that means telling George all about their relationship. As with Mrs St Charles, it seems her power will only end with her death.

Molly Keane's work has rarely made it into academic critiques of Anglo-Irish writing, perhaps because she was considered too commercial and popular a writer to deserve serious critical attention. But it may also be because she is the archetypal square peg in a round hole. While she didn't have the Catholic, guilt-laden attitude to sex that James Joyce or Edna O'Brien grappled with, as the late Clare Boylan noted, preventing her inclusion in more general academic appreciations of Irish writing, she was also far less inhibited about exposing the inner lives of the Anglo-Irish than Elizabeth Bowen, and she showed little time for the mysticism of the Celtic Revival headed by Lady Gregory and W B Yeats. As Boylan said of her books, "The stage curtain was ripped away to reveal some of the cruellest, most selfish, most riveting characters ever contributed to fiction." Most of these characters were mothers.

In her 1983 interview with Devlin, Keane said of her mother that "she really didn't know how to treat us. You can't think how neglected we were, by our parents. I mean they didn't do anything with us at all, they simply didn't bother. They were utterly reclusive. My mother had great taste but was totally oblivious to comfort." It is an ironic counterpoint to the image of "Mother Ireland" that the Celtic Revival, and the newly created Irish Free State, liked to portray at the time, and it's one that clearly had much resonance with Keane's vast legions of fans, both in Ireland and beyond. The mother-daughter relationship is still present in much fiction written by women today, from Maggie O'Farrell to Joyce Carol Oates. That's why Molly Keane will still be in print when so many of her counterparts wither and fade.

'Good Behaviour', Loving and Giving', 'Time After Time', 'Devoted Ladies' and 'The Rising Tide' by Molly Keane are published by Virago on 15 June (£7.99 each). To buy copies (free p&p), call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897