Good Behaviour: A BBC 2 Between the Covers Book Club Pick – Booker Prize Gems (Virago Modern Classics)

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Her most popular work, Songs of the Glens of Antrim (1901), a collection of slightly fey dialect poems, was much praised by the poet laureate, John Masefield, and set to music by the Irish composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hamilton Harty. The 1938 trial was reported in detail in the Irish Times, and throughout the war stories of infant death and abandonment appeared in the papers. Our guide for this particular version of hell is the unlovely, delusional daughter of the house, Aroon.

There were noddings and whisperings and tales of childbeds in far corners of the big house, and pale heavy-breasted girls dragging themselves again about their work.Aroon feeds “Mummie”, a heart patient, rabbit, a food that the woman loathes and which Rose, the family’s longtime cook and servant, warns has sickened the old lady in the past. Throughout Molly’s teenage years Agnes Skrine was up in her study working on More Songs from the Glens of Antrim and a set of translations from Italian (Dante, Leopardi, Tasso, D’Annunzio). Either we, out of love, feel obliged to help her manage her life, or the way she manages her life has a negative impact on those around her. These are the dying days of Anglo-Irish aristocracy where appearances must be preserved and emotions muted and controlled.

She lacks empathy and is unaware of her own bitterness, so we have little sympathy for her predicament. Mummy hides the bills in a drawer, focusing on what she might get with the money to beautify her own life instead.After Bobbie’s death Molly’s attention, divided between novels and the stage ever since the surprise success of her play Spring Meeting (1938), cowritten with John Perry, turned almost entirely to theater. I won’t say too much – although it is only the opening, short chapter, but it is a brilliant opening. Aroon is highly observant, but having lived an insular life on the increasingly run-down family estate and having only the governess, Mrs.

A cowardly child was a hidden sore, and a child driven to admit hatred of his pony was something of a leper in our society. Keane liked to explain that she stole the name from a sign she saw over a pub when she was out hunting, and even if this wasn’t strictly true it was apt.Half the meat was eaten while the other half went bad, hanging in the musty ice house without any ice.