She paints a picture of a life now disappeared - that of Anglo-Irish gentry, living their lives of fading and often-impoverished splendour, while all around them people they regarded as peasants were starting to dislike them and what. Keane wrote under her own name, and, earlier as M J Farrell.

Wily, shrewd, and terribly sad all at the same time: the story of a soul shriveling against cool, dark, shiny backgrounds. 'Good Behaviour' is my favourite Molly Keane book. And, flushed with the heat of her love for Richard (she never did see the implications of his intense friendship with Hubert), Axoon will let helping hands-and life-pass her by. no one spoke of the pain.'' Aroon's hopes for marriage to Richard fade, dying abruptly after Papa's suspicion-ridden death. Then Richard, after an upsetting voyeur's visit to Aroon's bed, leaves-and Hubert is killed in an auto accident. And somehow it seems that Aroon, too, is always fated to be unloved and ''on the outside.'' Although there are chimeric moments when she feels she's ''there at the heart of things''-Papa and Hubert take her to dances, her Charleston is ''a poem,'' dazzling young Richard Massingham shares jokes and memories with her-there are all those mysterious closed circuits which Aroon cannot explain: Mummie and Papa Hubert and Richard Papa and two hearty female neighbors Papa and Wild Rose. Brock, a veteran of rejection who aches to love, will (helped along by the dreadful servant known as Wild Rose) end up as a suicide.

Lavish love, then, comes only from their governess, that plump partridge Mrs. Aroon and younger brother Hubert, therefore, concentrate on drawing out affection from charming Papa, a marvelous horseman and discreet womanizer who's only impressed by the children's equestrian expertise. Charles-who, as a child and young woman, is at the mercy of her own timid, vulnerable nature and at the mercy of Mummie, an icy and elegant woman who loathes children, sociability, and housekeeping, whose every remark is a bare bodkin. With some wickedly crafty portraits, this Irish author, published here for the first time, pinpricks beneath the crusty ''good behaviour'' of some strenuously leisured Irish gentry in the 1920s, thus exposing a particularly refined brand of savagery.

Good behaviour molly keane summary