This novel at its heart has conflict between mother and daughter and starts with murder by rabbit mousse! It concerns the St Charles family and particularly the daughter Aroon. This is the 1920s and Aroon is tall, clumsy and by societal norms unlovely. It is narrated by Aroon and has one reviewer has said: A person who refuses to face reality and face life does not just make himself unhappy. It also puts people around it in suffering. Either we, out of love, feel obliged to help her manage her life, or the way she manages her life has a negative impact on those around her.

The story is tightly focussed around Aroon's childhood and her "coming out" years and her first and only love affair with her brother's friend, Richard. Towards the end of the book there are a number of extended chapters that follow Aroon to a local Big House, where there is new money. There she learns of Richard's engagement to another and within the same night she loses her father.

Animals, food and her brother are her consolation, her mother rarely responds even when Aroon reports that she thinks her baby brother is dead, she enquires where the staff are. Her father responds and inspires hope. She seeks out his company, a kind word, favour, he seeks comfort elsewhere. On October 20, a new film adaptation of John Williams’s novel Butcher’s Crossing, published by NYRB Classics in 2007, will be released in select movie theaters across the U.S. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film stars Nicolas Cage as the frontiersman Miller and Fred Hechinger... This was Molly Keane’s first book in which she used her real name…prior books by her used the pseudonym of M.J. Farrell. I do not know how old she was when she wrote this – in the preface Amy Gentry tells us that “Keane’s publisher of nearly fifty years rejected it, saying it was too nasty and suggesting she write at least one “nice” character. She refused. It sat in a drawer for years until her friend the actor Peggy Ashcroft read it during a visit and urged Keane to try again.” It got published in 1981…Keane was nearly 80 years old.

Athill, Diana (21 January 2017). "Diana Athill on Molly Keane: 'I admired many authors. But Molly, I loved' ". The Guardian. London . Retrieved 2 February 2023.In Loving without Tears, the widowed Angel, châtelaine of Owlbeg and the apogee of maternal selfishness, manipulates her children and household in equal measure, wishing only to repossess her returning son Julian. The novel was written only a few years after Bobby Keane’s death, and it is hard for Angel’s predicament not to resonate: she is ‘father and mother, too. A hopeless combination.’ This harshness belies the clear-sighted tenderness with which Angel is drawn. She can give as much as she takes, reminiscing to her retainer and erstwhile lover, Oliver: ‘You were so sad and sweet when we found you, that last lovely spring before the war, all alone in the Austrian Tyrol – and a gentian in your hat.’ It was these small accuracies that tied her charm to life.

Virtually uneducated, and by her own account ignored at home, as a young woman Molly effectively found herself a second family with the Perrys of County Tipperary. Their son, John Perry, was subsequently to co-author with her four plays that ran in the West End, with varying success, for over a decade. At the Perrys’, Molly met Bobby Keane, four years her junior and with whom she lived, unconventionally, for five years before they married. Her husband’s premature death in 1946 left her a penurious mother of two. It is widely believed that she fell silent for the following thirty years. In fact, Loving without Tears was published in 1951 and offers a full flavour of Molly Keane. It is a finely tuned performance, allowing Aroon, by turns pitiable and laughable, to expose Mummie’s hypocrisy which cannot admit her son Hubert’s homosexuality or her husband’s philandering with the servants and which prefers to ignore debt and progeny in favour of gardening. Yet Mummie, along with many of Molly Keane’s protagonists, is no caricature. She is unremittingly foul to Aroon and compellingly plausible. It all makes for an unsettling read, not knowing who has the strongest grasp on reality – the socially functioning, the serving Irish or perhaps the eccentric and the deluded? Moments hang poised between tragedy and farce. Aroon persuades herself that allowing her beloved Richard to rest his head, fleetingly, on her pendulous bosom is a seduction and to be prized. To Richard, Hubert’s lover, it is to be endured until it becomes ‘a bit hot’ and he flees. From here it only needs a short step to see how, by a cruel kind of natural selection, the breed became extinct. Evidently this rule of ‘stiff upper lip’, ‘not in front of the servants’, always acting in accordance with social mores, was experienced, and to some extent, followed by Molly Keane. Perhaps this is why she examines it quite so expertly in this novel. It is from first-hand experience that she has created these characters who adhere so impeccably to the code of ‘Good Behaviour’, and yet, by creating these dark jolting interruptions to the otherwise well-behaved narrative flow, she challenges the code. The reader can’t help but see that some things deserve to be spoken about, ought to be grieved over, mustn’t be swept under the carpet. Our good behaviour went on and on, endless as the days. No one spoke of the pain we were sharing. Our discretion was almost complete.Good Behaviour includes very little good behavior, featuring instead delicious and deleterious accounts of illicit sex and wild high jinks, and a mother-daughter duo who can scrap with the best of them. I stood about, smiling, compressed, submerged in politeness; aching in my isolation; longing to be alone; to be away; to be tomorrow's person

In Jane Gardam’s elegant introduction to this beautiful Folio edition, she tells us about an episode when Molly Keane’s six-year-old daughter wanted to weep at the death of her father. Apparently Molly Keane told her child, ‘We mustn’t let [the butler] see us crying.’ Molly Keane's Good Behaviour presents a character whose own strict Christian code wreaks havoc on all those around her. Though she herself tells the tale, we somehow see her morality's disastrous consequences. Hilarious and sinister. Type in any changes to the title, synopsis or contributor information using the Radio Times Style Guide for reference.

While she finally has the opportunity to make a choice for herself, which should be to take her freedom; in my opinion, she does the wrong thing: she maintains this silly ideal of good behaviour no matter what dignity from which it follows that she does not allow herself to be happy: Another example of her self-delusion involves the relationship between Rose & her father after he has a stroke. There are several very transparent clues that Rose has been, to use vulgar parlance, giving the Major a hand job. Aroon even walks in on this once but says (believes?) that Rose was massaging the Major's cold foot! Even Aroon must know the location of a foot - it must have been obvious that the activity was occurring a bit higher than that! After the death of her husband, Molly Keane moved to Ardmore, County Waterford, a place she knew well, and lived there with her two daughters, Sally and Virginia, until she died in 1996. She is buried beside the Church of Ireland church, almost in the centre of the village. So there is sex, murder, suicide, pregnancy, masturbation, nannies, class, queer characters and much more. But nothing is directly named. The satire is sharp as is the dissection of emotional relationships: Find sources: "Good Behaviour"Keane novel– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2017) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)