Great Granny Webster

Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) was born into a rich Anglo-Irish aristocratic family. She rebelled against her background at an early age and led a hectic and bohemian life, which included marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell. In the 1970s Blackwood began to write. Among her books are several novels, including Great Granny Webster and Corrigan (both available as NYRB Classics); On the Perimeter, an account of the women's anti-nuclear protest at Greenham Common; and The Last of the Duchess, about the old age of the Duchess of Windsor. »

Honor Moore's collections of poems are Red Shoes, Darling, and Memoir. She edited Amy Lowell: Selected Poems for the Library of America and is author of The White Blackbird, a life of her grandmother, the painter Margarett Sargent. »

By Caroline Blackwood
Introduction by Honor Moore

Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's masterpiece. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling raconteur long before she made her name as a strikingly original writer. This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

None of us will forget Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster, a matter-of-fact account—and all the grimmer for this matter-of-factness—of the temperamental and circumstantial misfortunes of an Ulster family. Although it's deceptively concise, it evokes the spirits of no less than four ages—Victorian, Edwardian, pre- and postwar— in exact and resonant prose... A unique literary experience.
— Philip Larkin

Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's best book. In the monstrous old dowager of Hove, and the ruling class she represents, Blackwood found a subject grandly commensurate with her own extraordinary style of aghast relish.
— Jonathan Raban

Like a box of chocolates with amphetamine centers.
— Francis Wyndham, Sunday Times (London)

Also see:

Corrigan
By Caroline Blackwood
Afterword by Andrew Solomon

With Corrigan Caroline Blackwood takes a long, hard look at our dearly beloved notions of saints and sinners, victims and villains, patrimony and present pleasure—and winks.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $12.95
Price: $9.71 (25% off)

Jun 30, 2002
128 pages
ISBN: 1590170075
9781590170076
Literature in English
NYRB Classics

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