Now, more than three decades later, Keane’s daughter opens “Molly Keane: A Life” with a tender description of herself and her dying mother on a February evening in 1996. “She longed for life and she longed for death, and she felt cheated of both,” Sally Phipps writes. Even though, Phipps writes, “She knew my weakness, my fear of the scalpel (which she wielded so fruitfully in her own work).” Not being “nasty enough” was not the only challenge. Molly Keane was born in Ireland in 1904, the third of five children of Agnes and Walter Skrine, he an English gentleman and she a popular poet. Ashcroft was an ailing houseguest when Keane gave her the manuscript of “Good Behaviour” for diversion; Ashcroft championed it, and later that year the first novel by Molly Keane was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Source: Washington Post December 25, 2017 21:56 UTC