Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1977
Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) was born into an aristocratic Irish family of great wealth and renown. She married three talented and famous men: the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell. She worked as a writer and a journalist.
“The granny in question is unforgettable, presiding over an
ancestral mansion with no heating and terrified butlers who wear
boots inside because of the leaky roof that she’s too stingy to
repair. The book is a sort of matricidal fantasia…” —Negar Azimi,
The New Yorker
"Narrated by an unnamed 14-year-old female, this masterful novella
is equal parts macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family
portrait. Without being overly self-conscious in its artlessness,
it reads like the guileless confession of a simple innocent
embroiled in a tangled net of ravaged and ruined lives. There’s a
marvelous simplicity to the tale." —Lucy Scholes, Literary Hub
“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
“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
“Blackwood loves monsters. No character in modern literature is
more obdurately monstrous than Great Granny Webster. An Edwardian
relic, this utterly pleasureless, stingy, censorious, ossified
banshee, forever ensconced in her painfully stiff chair before a
fireplace laid but never lit, is the stuffed and essentially
powerless dragon of a musty castle, the remnant of hidebound and
pointless traditional values, someone who has never in her life
given anyone a reason to like her.” —Gary Indiana, Bookforum
“Great Granny Webster feels more like a memoir than a novel…but it
is as gripping as a whodunit. There are passages like passages in a
strange house: when they turn a corner, something unexpectedly
shocking comes into sight. It is also very funny, and the
characters are vividly eccentric—or just plain vivid: Blackwood’s
writing never merely trundles along.” —Gabriele Annan, The Times
Literary Supplement
“Blackwood’s magnificent works are like pure odes to odium, her
prose cuttingly matter-of-fact. . . She should be hailed as one of
the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived.” —Virginia Feito,
CrimeReads
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