Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a novelist. She began writing in the early 20s using a

pseudonym to conceal her identity from her sporting friends. She wrote with great

success about the Anglo-Irish world in which she lived.

She described with agonizing accuracy the fading fortunes of its gentry, eking out their lives

in a mixture of poverty and snobbery behind the facade of the big house.

Then after a period in the early 50s as a successful West End playwright, she fell silent to emerge under her real name 25 years later as one of today's most highly acclaimed writers.

So Desert Islandisks welcomes on the one hand the author of Full House and Loving Without Tears,

M. J. Farrell.

And on the other, the novelist whose book Good Behavior

just missed the book a prize in 1981,

and who's also given us time after time

and loving and giving. We recognize her today as Molly

Keene. So Molly, no question of a pseudonym this second time around. You are now required to be

famous. Do you mind being famous?

I never realize that I am. If I want to know, the one time I realized that I really was famous

was when I came home to my fishing village in Ardmore and the postman

came to bring me my letters and he put his arms around me and kissed me to congratulate me, which really was very unexpected

and absolutely enchanting.

But do you enjoy being famous?

At moments very much, yes, and when people like that recognize me, I think

...