Born into an Anglo-Irish family with roots going back to the Norman conquest, Mary Nesta Skrine, known to readers as MJ Farrell and, later, as Molly Keane, grew up in a privileged world that partied on as the Britsh Empire faded. To the colonised Irish its hauteur was resented, its eccentricity derided. Yet the two cultures of "bog Irish" and "horse Protestants" fed off each other to enrich the English language. Nobody saw through the ascendancy classes more perceptively or wittily than one of their own.
Making her debut with a Mills & Boon romance, she won critical recognition with Devoted Ladies (1934), confronting the risque theme of lesbianism. Then, when her play Spring Morning (1938) became a West End hit, the secret of her identity was out.
After the death of her husband, Bobby Keane, the fun went out of writing, but she came back in 1981 with Good Behaviour, a black comedy adapted for TV by Hugh Leonard. She wrote two more novels, Time After Time and Loving and Giving, and saw Virago reissue her MJ Farrell novels before her death, in 1996, aged 91.
Other favourites Mary Lavin and Kate O’Brien.
Ciarán Carty is a writer and the editor of the Hennessy New Irish Writing page
