Molly Keane

Keane's birthplace in County Kildare holds the quiet origin of a woman who turned childhood deprivation into sharp, enduring fiction. She was born Mary Nesta Skrine in Ryston Cottage, Newbridge, on 20 July 1904, the date and place that anchor every later alias she invented. The house may have seemed ordinary, but it produced a mind stubborn enough to refuse respectability and imagine its way out of boredom.