The opening of Molly Keane's Good Behaviour is chillingly unforgettable. The narrator, 65-year-old Aroon St. Charles, relates the death of her mother in the small Gothic folly where they have moved, with one maid, surrounded by mementos of their past…. Aroon then takes us back to her childhood and we see the distance between the harsh woman she is now—as her mother used to be—and the affectionate girl she was then. We see where life has let her down.

The eccentricities of Aroon's mother and father as they pass their days at their ancestral home, Temple Alice, make the reader forget the macabre opening for a while…. This novel incorporates something of the sparkling, irresponsible mood of the 20s and 30s celebrated in her novels Conversation Piece (1932) and Devoted Ladies (1934). The language revels in the details of life in a grandish country house. Occasionally, when Aroon...