Set in the Anglo-Irish world of “great houses” during their days of waning influence in the first half of the 20th century, this satire attacks the emotional frigidity of a society that has allowed propriety and decorum to replace sincerity and affection.

The first-person narrator of the story is Aroon St. Charles, the eldest child of a landed family of long pedigree. Although their estate is in Ireland, in the vicinity of Limerick, they are English and their ways are English ways: dressing for dinner, maintaining a small army of servants, and observing a strict hierarchy of inherited status and privilege. Slowly, however, their world is falling apart.

The story opens when Aroon is 57 years old, on the day when her mother passes away at Gull Cottage, where the two of them have lived in reduced circumstances, tended only by one remaining servant, Rose, for many years. The time of the story’s present day is approximately 1960, but the date is immaterial: Aroon is transfixed by the past, especially the period from right before World War I until the death of her father during the Great Depression. These were the years when she and her late brother Hubert grew from childhood to adulthood—the years when she and her mother settled into an abiding hostility and an unending power struggle. Aroon launches into the exploration of her past as a way of explaining her present miserable life.

Born into a class of beautiful people who took their own prestige for granted, Aroon was a large and ungainly girl who grew into a graceless and unwanted young woman. In contrast, her beloved brother Hubert was handsome all his short life. As Aroon recollects their governess, Mrs. Brock, and their superficially happy life at the St. Charles family estate, Temple Alice, the reader gradually becomes aware of the deeper unhappiness that permeates every event.

Aroon’s mother is cold and unloving to her daughter, although appearing to be perfectly behaved in all their interactions. Properly reared, Aroon is oblivious to her own naiveté. Her recollections of her handsome father’s popularity with women and of her beautiful mother’s emotional fastidiousness explain the family’s misery even when Aroon herself seems to be at best vaguely aware of the implications of her story.

At the heart of the story are her brother Hubert, his best friend Richard, and a long summer month that they spend at Temple Alice. Aroon, then in her late teens, has been denied a “season” in London—the traditional presentation of a marriageable daughter to the elite ranks of society in a series of lavish debutante parties—because the family can no longer afford such luxuries after her father loses a leg during the Great War. Aroon’s innocence prevents her from seeing that she is merely a convenient camouflage for the two young men’s attraction for each other. In her imagination, she is as good as engaged to Richard.

As tragedy strikes, and the family finances settle into further indebtedness, Aroon’s father has a stroke, and she is left with no ally in a world dominated by her heartless mother. Through Aroon’s continued recollections, the reader comes to understand perfectly the choices she has made in the opening chapter of the story.

Molly Keane draws on her personal knowledge of the Anglo-Irish hunting set in this novel, the first she published under her own name. Born into an old English family on a fine Irish estate, she lived the life she creates for Aroon. Literature was so alien to the world she lived in that she published her first novels under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell; in her story, the only punishment of a child occurs when a boy is caught reading a book of poetry on a fine day for riding.

Although Keane’s story does not focus on the political, social, or religious differences between the English and the Irish, her satire on the code of behavior to which the English gentry subscribed helps to explain the abyss between the two cultures while it also illuminates the depth of the hostility between them.

Bibliography
Adams, Alice. “Coming Apart at the Seams: Good Behaviour as an Anti-Comedy of Manners.” Journal of Irish Literature 20 (September 1991): 27–35.
Lynch, Rachel Jane. “Molly Keane’s Comedies of Anglo-Irish Manners.” In The Comic Tradition in Irish Women Writers. Edited by Theresa O’Connor. Tallahassee: Florida University Press, 1996, 73–98.