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Synopsis
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.
Publishers Weekly
Great Granny Webster, Caroline Blackwood's grimly hilarious and semi-autobiographical 1977 tale of boozy, oddball aristocrats is back in print, and its title character an impossibly dour and correct old woman is just one of the chilly, eccentric relatives that the teenage narrator has to endure. Other loved ones include a deranged grandmother and a cheerfully suicidal aunt. The novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize when first released. Blackwood, an Irish heiress and one-time wife of Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, is the subject of the recent biography Dangerous Muse. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.