Literary Criticism: Molly Keane's writing career came, much like her own Anglo-Irish identity, in two parts. The first spanned 1926 to 1956, when she wrote under the gender-neutral pseudonym, MJ Farrell. Following the premature death of her husband she did not appear again in print until she published, under her own name, her masterpiece, Good Behaviour, in 1981.
All 14 of her novels deal with the fading Ascendancy class in the Big House tradition that goes back to Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent. Keane is seen as the last in this line of writers and is frequently placed alongside Elizabeth Bowen as a feminist elegist for the Big House and its people. But the two novelists, close friends who both lived to see their own houses demolished, worked in entirely different ways. Bowen's work is realist, characterised by restraint, emotional intelligence and a historical perspective. Keane's work is black farce or vicious satire. The elegant stoicism Bowen celebrated becomes, in Keane's work, wilful blindness. The good manners of Bowen's world are ruthlessly undermined by Keane's scatological bent. Her continuous matching of politeness with crude bodily functions exposes the fragility of symbolic order, especially in the absence of real power. Diminished power made defiant dandies of the Anglo-Irish for Bowen; it made them merely grotesques for Keane. Together the two are not so much continuous as complementary, Keane supplying a subconscious, psychological Gothic to counterpoint Bowen's political art.
Such are the qualities of Keane's writing, which have not been attested to in the biographical criticism that has made up the bulk of the writing about her. They are examined closely in this volume and prove qualities which make Keane rich pickings for modern academics, a crew for whom the fashion is to undermine the hegemony of social norms to reveal "authentic" primal selves. It is an unpleasant streak in modern criticism - obsessed with shit and sexuality, doublespeak and discontinuity - but it finds a fitting canvas in Keane.
The result is a collection of essays which do service to Keane's individual voice but in which the tone is rarely inviting. The general reader will feel more often as one eavesdropping on an experts' conversation than one being given the benefit of an expert's knowledge, knowledge which, when used by critics such as Declan Kiberd, can open up popular books to deep resonances both within themselves and in the context of society and history. Of course, it is not the job of every collection of academic essays to eschew the alienating coinage of academia - it has its own intellectual validity; it is, however, the job of the book reviewer to point this out to the prospective general reader.
If that general reader is a devotee of Molly Keane then she will find much of value here. Carolyn Lesnick takes on Seamus Deane's idea that the persistence of the Big House novel is a sign of the paucity of the Irish literary imagination and a dubious legacy of Yeats by showing how Keane's "untimely" work and, specifically, the challenges it poses and solutions it devises for its characters take it "well beyond the Big House and its demesne". Eibhear Walshe is his usual sensitive self as he explores Keane's undermining of the colonial, manly education. Ellen L O'Brien manages to mould an accessible essay on Keane's "nasty" bits from ungainly critical apparatus, one which will add intellectual depth to the laughter Keane so often provokes by her opposition of filth and fairy cakes. What is sorely lacking here is a real writer. Colm Tóibín , Anne Enright or John Banville could have graced this volume with an artist's wisdom and a light touch amid the dense academic verbiage. Four Courts has given us a beautifully produced book marred only by unsystematic annotation which is quite hard to follow and maddening at times.
Alan O'Riordan is literary correspondent with Magill magazine and a freelance journalist and theatre critic
Molly Keane: Centenary Essays Edited by Eibhear Walshe and Gwenda Young Four Courts Press, 224pp. €45