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. Marian Keyes, Polly Devlin, Michèle Roberts and Emma Donoghue provide the introductions. Maggie O'Farrell wrote that 'she writes better than anyone else about the mother-daughter relationship, in all its thorny, fraught, inescapable complexity.' Here, for the first time, is her biography and, written by one of her two daughters, it provides an honest portrait of a fascinating, complicated woman who was a brilliant writer and a portrait of the Anglo-Irish world of the first half of the twentieth century.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.

Distant and awkward relationships between children and their parents would prove to be a recurring theme for Keane. She was educated, as was the custom in Anglo-Irish households, by a series of governesses and then at boarding school. Molly Keane's novels reflect the world she inhabited she was from a 'rather serious hunting and fishing, church-going family'. The manuscript, which had languished in a drawer for many years, was lent to a visitor, the actress Peggy Ashcroft, who encouraged Keane to publish it. In 1981, aged seventy, she published Good Behaviour under her own name. Between 19, she wrote eleven novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M.J. Hailed as the Irish Nancy Mitford in her day as well as writing books she was the leading playwright of the '30s, her work directed by John Gielgud. Molly Keane (1904 - 96) was an Irish novelist and playwright (born in County Kildare) most famous for Good Behaviour which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

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