It is through the description of her marriage that we learn something of Keane’s complexity. Keane met her husband, Bobbie, at Woodroofe, a house where horsemanship was “an art form” practised with the “seriousness and insouciance of true artists in any sphere’’. She used to say: “Being a housewife is far more creative than writing but it does not pay so well.” In her milieu, riding mattered more than writing, and Phipps explains this in a way even the horse-averse will understand.
It was her duty to amuse – and she was good at it. And yet, in Molly’s youth, writing was something to hide – an undesirable gift that might frighten off the men. Her mother, Agnes, was a poet (her Songs of the Glens of Antrim, published in 1901 under the pen name Moira O’Neill, sold 16,000 copies, outselling Yeats). Her father, Walter Skrine, was a gentleman, a former colonial governor of Mauritius, and a fearless horseman, a man who “belonged to that species of Englishman who falls in love with Ireland”. Keane was born in 1904, in County Kildare. Towards the end of her life, she notes: “Well-being returns when I see sun-light glittering through a new batch of marmalade on the kitchen table.” She was a connoisseur of life’s small, simple but intense pleasures. Molly Keane knew a good house, lived in several and, when funds failed, magically transformed her seaside bungalow as if it were somewhere grand. She describes Molly as “a child of nature and of the drawing room”, and revisits the rooms that now survive only in her mother’s novels, where “sun still bleaches a hall table and silk curtains rot slowly in the windows, or a master cook lifts a perfectly risen soufflé from her sulky kitchen range”. Keane’s writing was sensual and Phipps’s is too: she gives us the texture of the past.
There is a family likeness (though she is never slavishly imitative) between Phipps’s writing and her mother’s. Keane went on to suggest the biography be approached as though it were a novel – advice that has been partly, and brilliantly, followed. Phipps was understandably uncertain about the undertaking – this, incredibly, is her first book – whereas Keane’s only fear was that the elder of her two daughters would not be “nasty enough”. There was a question in the air (implied, if not directly asked): what had her life amounted to? Presumably, Keane encouraged this biography not only to settle the question, but because she wanted to spur on a daughter she would have known to be a born writer. Sally Phipps is Keane’s daughter, and, early on, remembers having a conversation with 90-year-old Molly amid the driftwood of her possessions, in Ardmore, County Waterford, Ireland.
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