Devoted Ladies, Molly Keane
Devoted Ladies, Molly Keane
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
Club: $12.49

Devoted Ladies

Author: Molly Keane, Polly Devlin

Narrator: Aoife McMahon

Unabridged: 7 hr 21 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 04/08/2021

Synopsis

'Keane has a sharp eye, but a compassionate one' GUARDIAN

'I admired many authors. But Molly, I loved' DIANA ATHILL

'Miss Farrell's genius lies in her remorselessness . . . deliciously funny' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Jessica and Jane have been living together for six months and are devoted friends - or are they? Jessica loves her friend with the cruelty of total possessiveness; Jane is rich, silly, and drinks rather too many brandy-and-sodas.

Watching from the sidelines, their friend Sylvester regrets that Jane should be 'loved and bullied and perhaps even murdered by that frightful Jessica', but decides it's none of his business. When the Irish gentleman George Playfair meets Jane, however, he thinks otherwise and entices her to Ireland where the battle for her devotion begins.

About Molly Keane

Molly Keane (1904-1996) was an Irish novelist and playwright. She grew up at Ballyrankin in County Wexford and was educated at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. She married Bobby Keane, one of a Waterford squirearchical family in 1938 and had two daughters. She used her married name for her later novels, several of which (Good Behaviour, Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she wrote eleven novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym M. J. Farrell. Her husband died suddenly in 1946, and following the failure of a play she published nothing for twenty years. In 1981, Good Behaviour came out under her own name. The novel was warmly received and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

About Polly Devlin

Polly Devlin is a writer, broadcaster and filmmaker. She holds an OBE for services to literature. After spending her childhood in Northern Ireland, at the age of twenty-two she took up her first job - as a writer, and soon a features editor for British Vogue in London. A couple of years later, she moved to New York to work on American Vogue - where, once more, she was very much part of the scene she wrote about in her newspaper column and articles including for The Sunday Times, New Statesman and Observer. Her first book, All of Us There is a Virago Modern Classic. She divides her time between London and New York where until her recent retirement, she taught Creative Non-Fiction at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has also been a judge for various awards which include the Booker Prize (1984), Irish Times Literary Award (1994) and Pushkin Prize (1998).

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ali on August 05, 2012

I do love a book which divides opinion. As I was preparing to write about my reactions to the novel, I glanced over a few reviews of it on Librarything.com and Goodreads.com – and there certainly seems to be as many people who really liked it as didn’t. So before I go any further I must immediately......more

Goodreads review by Zen on July 29, 2010

What a horrible book. Evil lesbian, "nasty" appearing to be used to mean "homosexual" (as in, "Albert was a nasty boy"), casual racism. And even without all that it was a relentlessly unpleasant book. Three stars because it was so effectively, deliberately horrible. I was absorbed even as my brain ma......more

Goodreads review by A. on July 13, 2012

Keane is a new discovery and a happy one for me. She wrote this novel as a response to a newfound awareness of homosexuals in her society, both set and written in the 1930's. Keane saw gays as a fresh cast of characters for a novel. Here, she satirizes the upper, fox-hunting, class, skewering their......more

Goodreads review by David on May 06, 2022

Closer to 3.5 I had never heard of Molly Keane until a friend recently suggested that I check out her work, specifically 'Devoted Ladies' (due, I guess, to its addition of gay characters; something Keane didn't normally do). Knowing I was a huge fan of P.G. Wodehouse, my friend let me know that he t......more

Goodreads review by Dan on May 09, 2022

Too lazy and busy to write a review right now, but I loved this book, and now I want to read more of Keane's stuff. What a joy to discover a new author to love.........more

Quotes

Keane has a sharp eye, but a compassionate one Guardian

Keane's distinctive blend of elegant savagery and deep affection . . . its human relationships tortured like bonsai by good form, its open-hearted, sensual passion for horses, dogs and landscape Evening Standard

I admired many authors. But Molly, I loved

The very best of AngloIrish writing

Miss Farrell's genius lies in her remorselessness . . . deliciously funny New York Times Book Review

Her books are witty, sardonic, human comedies, edged by black humour, and, like all good comedies, sadness and pathos lie close to the glittering surface

A writer of genius Wall Street Journal

Add to Cart
Add to Wish List