This year’s biography of Molly Keane by her daughter, Sally Phipps, is a good read. As I read it I wondered how she knew so much about her mother’s childhood.
Then I remembered that I have a copy of Molly Keane’s Nursery Cooking, published in 1985. Molly wrote a fourteen page Preface describing her childhood and this proved jolly useful for Sally. Nursery Cooking cashes in on Molly’s success with Good Behaviour in 1981, short-listed for the Booker. The Preface is good but it is a badly designed and laid-out book and the recipes are unexceptional. It would be more rewarding to re-read Molly Keane’s early novels written as MJ Farrell, a name she saw above a pub door hacking home from hunting. Two Days in Aragon, published in 1941, is one of her best.
Aragon is based on the Villiers-Stuart house on the Blackwater, Dromana.
THE biography of Molly is by Marjorie’s Quarton, ‘Oil and Water. The world of Molly Keane’. ignored by the critics as it was self-published, it lifts the lid on areas where Molly’s daughter Sally Phipps might have feared to go. Available through Amazon.co.uk
Thank you, I have ordered a copy.