Great Granny Webster

(Paperback, Main)

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Description

Two years after the war, the heroine of Caroline Blackwood's partially autobiographical novel is sent to convalesce from a minor operation at her Great Granny Webster's house in Brighton. But the only sea air she experiences are the drafts that creep into the house where she is required to sit quietly with only Richards, the tyrannized maid, and iron-willed, humourless Great Granny Webster for company. As for the rest of the family, her dashing father Ivor is dead in a jungle grave in Burma, mad Grandmother Dunmartin tried to kill her own grandson at his christening, long-suffering Grandfather Dunmartin allowed his estate to fall into ruin while he pretended his wife was sane enough to run it, and even glamorous Aunt Lavinia - though light-hearted - is determinedly suicidal. The laconic tone in which this motley cast of characters is described only adds to the horror - and the hilarity.

Reviews

Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwoods 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 Blackwoods Great Granny Webster, a matter-of-fact accountand all the grimmer for this matter-of-factnessof the temperamental and circumstantial misfortunes of an Ulster family. Although its deceptively concise, it evokes the spirits of no less than four agesVictorian, Edwardian, pre- and postwarin 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 novelbut 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 eccentricor just plain vivid: Blackwoods writing never merely trundles along. Gabriele Annan, The Times Literary Supplement

Blackwoods 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

Author Bio

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.