Molly Keane: A Life - Softcover

A vivid and sensitive portrait of Anglo-Irish society . . . finely attuned to the complexities of her mother's character, and captures the mix of "courage, glamour and fantasy" that sustained her class. This biography lays down new critical avenues for reappraising Molly Keane's considerable oeuvre (Irish Times)

Sally Phipps has written an intimate, affectionate life . . . a fascinating book that really needed to be written, and it fills a big gap. Not enough is known about the Anglo-Irish in the twentieth century. Let's hope it leads to a Molly Keane revival (Spectator)

In this exceptional Life of the Anglo-Irish novelist Molly Keane, written by her own daughter, there are few dates, fewer sources and no dull patches at all. Keane told Phipps to make it "as much like a novel as possible", and worried that she wouldn't be "nasty enough". But Phipps, in recounting her rackety mother's huntin' dancin' drinkin' life, the sparkle of her early novels and the darkness of her late, is better than nasty - she is forgiving and acute (Sunday Telegraph)

Her daughter's incisive portrait of her 'enchanting and troubled personality' delivers real understanding (Country Life)

Sally Phipps almost pulls off the impossible: she light-footedly brings Molly Keane back to life, and makes one grateful for the illusion of having met her (Kate Kellaway Observer)

An arrestingly graceful, truthful and compassionate portrait (Times Literary Supplement)

Sally Phipps, the novelist's daughter, and herself a born writer, has given us an astonishing glimpse into her mother's lost world in this beautiful biography . . . what Phipps has achieved in this book is uncanny and thrilling. No daughter has ever written about a mother with such pitiful honesty . . . If you are to read only one biography this year, make it Sally Phipps's Molly Keane: A Life. I assure you, this is memoir as work of art (Irish Examiner)

Molly Keane, Sally Phipps's life of her mother, is as fresh and true and eccentric as any of Keane's novels, and shows just how good biography can be in the hands of a natural writer (Frances Wilson Spectator)

A delight and a phenomenon; the literary biography of a novelist . . . by her writer daughter, who manifests herself quite as observant compassionate original and dauntless as her mother (Candia McWilliam Herald)

Beautifully written . . . this sparking biography serves her memory and achievement fairly, fondly, and as one suspects, truthfully (Irish Sunday Times)