![]() ![]() ![]() 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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