She was the last chronicler of the Irish “big house,” summoning onto the page the worst in her ilk-and, indeed, in herself-with infectious relish. It was cruelly deprived of a Booker prize by Salman Rushdie. Hubert went the year after, and in 1914 Papa rejoined his regiment. Molly Keane’s 1981 novel was a comeback for her, aged 77, after 20 years of silence and the first book published under her real name. Molly Keane was one of them, Anglo-Irish in every prejudice and predilection, but she was also a writer of genius. 8 I was sent to school the following year. Snobs of the deepest dye, they shrank in revulsion from anything connected with commerce-to their own ruination. They were more knowledgeable about the lives of foxes, pheasants and salmon than those of the Irish people who surrounded them. (One of the funniest scenes in Keane’s masterpiece, “Good Behaviour,” describes the horrified reaction to the discovery that the young heir of a landed family has been reading “A Child’s Garden of Verses.”) Horses, dogs, the house, the land and hospitality to their own kind were the chief concerns of the majority of the Anglo-Irish. The Anglo-Irish were also the people who galloped and swanned through the pages of Molly Keane’s 14 novels: the sort of people who considered an interest in politics dreary and for whom reading anything beyond Burke’s Peerage and the General Stud Book was considered degenerate. Molly Keane, Good Behaviour 4 likes Like Our water supply was meagre and my grandfather had deflected a considerable quantity of it to a pond on which, in the shelter of a grove of rhododendrons, he loved to row himself about. We have created the best of its political intelligence.” We have created the most of the modern literature of this country. We are the people of Burke we are the people of Grattan we are the people of Swift, the people of Emmet, the people of Parnell. In a famous speech before the Senate of the Irish Free State in 1925, William Butler Yeats eulogized his people, the Anglo-Irish, a race, as they saw it, unto themselves: “We are one of the great stocks of Europe.

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