Dangerous Muse: The Life Of Lady Caroline Blackwood [Paperback]

Nancy Schoenberger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 2002

You can see her dark-eyed beauty in photos by Walker Evans, and her bewitching figure in paintings by Lucian Freud. She is the mermaid of whom poet Robert Lowell writes in The Dolphin (and he was clutching her portrait when he died). She was Lady Caroline Blackwood, legendarily witty and alluring but also a legendary drunk. Raised an heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood (1931-1996) moved easily among the aristocracy, the bohemians of postwar England and the liberal intelligentsia of 1960s New York. She has been called a muse to genius-though her marriages to Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz, and Robert Lowell were as troubled as they were inspiring-and she was an author herself, short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1977. In this first biography of Blackwood, Nancy Schoenberger deftly paints a complex woman who was captivating to her dying day.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996), with her wealth, fame, brilliance, eccentricity, dysfunction and illness, is an ideal subject for an absorbingly juicy (albeit tragic) biography. Perhaps best known for marrying painter Lucian Freud, then Aaron Copland's prize student Israel Citkowitz, then patrician poet Robert Lowell, the mysterious Blackwood, with her enormous, unflinching eyes, was "one of the great beauties of her day"; she was also a writer in her own right. Schoenberger (Girl on a White Porch), former director of the Academy of American Poets, never met Blackwood (the day of their proposed meeting, Blackwood was hospitalized and died soon thereafter). The author traces this troubled, fascinating life from a childhood on a grand family estate in Northern Ireland, through her marriages to brilliant yet tortured and unstable men, and then through widowhood, when Blackwood inhabited a former funeral home in Sag Harbor, on New York's Long Island, reputedly haunted still by her dark presence. Blackwood inspired her husbands' brilliant works such as Freud's photograph Girl in Bed (it was clutched by Lowell when he died of a heart attack) and Lowell's The Dolphin, dedicated to Caroline. But Schoenberger calls her "both a muse and an anti-muse," for she also undermined their creativity with her alcoholism and cruel wit, provoking their worst qualities, like Freud's gambling and womanizing, Citkowitz's passivity and Lowell's bipolar illness and abusiveness. Alternately vibrant and pathetic, Blackwood alienated and insulted everyone around her. Schoenberger targets the general reader over the scholar particularly with her exploration of Blackwood's "curse" but those interested in literary biography, particularly in the lives of artists and the sources of their creativity, will find relevant material here. Agents, Joy Harris and Leslie Daniels. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (July 3)Forecast: Though already chosen for the Wall Street Journal's summer reading list, with first serial rights sold to Vogue, this myth-making bio will have to show unexpected reach to appeal to a mass of readers. The author will do some regional publicity in New York and Washington, D.C.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Lady Caroline Blackwood, who died in 1996, is best known in the United States for her turbulent marriage to poet Robert Lowell (the last of her three husbands). Born into the Anglo-Irish nobility in 1931, she was an heiress to the Guinness fortune and one of the most glamorous socialites of her day. Brilliant but moody, she first married the painter Lucian Freud, who commemorated her eerie beauty in several famous paintings. Although she had written sporadically throughout her life, it was not until after Lowell's death in 1977 that she began to concentrate on her haunting, often autobiographical fiction and nonfiction (e.g., Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the Booker). Blackwood died before she and Schoenberger (creative writing, Coll. of William & Mary; Girl on a White Porch) could agree on this biography. The subsequent destruction of her papers, plus the refusal of Blackwood's children and family to contribute, has made this a rather thin study of a bewildering woman whose character is not entirely explained by hereditary eccentricity, alcoholism, and an unhappy life. For general and specialized collections. (Illustrations not seen.) Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (October 15, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306811871
• ISBN-13: 978-0306811876
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #223,116 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Mediocre, September 3, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood (Hardcover)

There is a problem with this book, and it's the sort of problem always encountered with books of this type. That is, it's a biography of someone who's only famous because of the people they
married and/or bedded. The biographer is thus left with a dilemma; they have to convince us to care. In order to do this, they have to bring the person's character to life. This requires a novelist's talent, or a reasonable facsimile therein. It requires what David Cecil brought to Lady Caroline Lamb in "Young
Melbourne: a conviction that in spite of infuriating self-destructiveness, we understand the bond between them and the famous person, and why that person loved them. Nancy Schoenberger may have such talent; alas, it's not evident here. Lady Caroline Blackwood was rich, aristocratic, and beautiful. Okay, got that. Schoenberger also tries to convince us that Blackwood's a major writing talent, with very little success. Her work seems at all times slight, when it isn't cruel. She was also alcoholic from a very early age; a sloven; a depressive; a neglectful parent, and an unsuccessful wife. She was apparently also ambitious-she only married artists. There are odd gaps in the book, which seem to come from threatened lawsuits. Her children did not participate; Schoenberger says she understands why (and so do we) but the result leaves holes in the narrative. Two out of her three husbands are dead, and the other apparently didn't talk. So we don't know why they married her, and the book supplies few hints. Ms. Schoenberger maintains that Blackwood was an artist and a `muse.' Yes, but. From the
evidence here you could just as easily conclude that these not very wealthy arty types married her because she was rich as well as beautiful and they were crashing snobs. Ms. Schoenberger states she is `haunted' by Blackwood. Translation: she identifies rather too heavily with her subject. And we get, unfortunately, the smarmy romanticism typical of this type of `the-beautiful-and-the-damned' project. You need the talent of Fitzgerald to bring that off without gagging. What a book he would have made of this material! You get a clearer idea of Caroline Blackwood from her first husband's portrait of her than you do from this biography. That's the difference, I'm afraid, between genius and reportage. Put another way: a minor literary figure gets a minor-league biography.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A paradoxical and beguiling figure,, September 6, 2001

By 

Diana A. Strelow (Portsmouth, Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood (Hardcover)

Lady Caroline is extremely charming and repugnant at once, to this reader. Like another reviewer, I found the book to be impossible to put down, and I read almost straight through, until I was done. Beautiful, high-born, and slovenly, a constant smoker of cigarettes and a night-and-day-long consumer of vodka, Lady Caroline Blackwood nonetheless marries both a well known painter and America's leading poet of her time. She never stops attracting famous, wealthy men. Nancy Schoenberger peels off layer after layer to reveal both Lady Caroline and her aristocratic and wealthy set of friends and relations. I thought hard about those jet set and well born, many of them famous, friends of hers, as I read, and it occurred to me to think that they were blessed with money and talent and free time and fame, while the rest of us are even more blessed in that we have been given the work ethic, common sense, and bills to pay. The book inspires such thoughts and comparisons, whether or not they are on the money. I enjoyed it hugely.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great, except for one area, April 6, 2002

By 

S. McCourt-Roquelaure (Co. Antrim, NI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood (Hardcover)

I have to admit that when I first began reading this biography of Lady Caroline, it did not immediately enthrall me the way I thought it might, after having read the book's description. The first chapter or so deals almost exclusively with her family's history, and I found the endless names and descriptions of the different people boring. *However* as I began to read forward, I found myself fascinated with the sort of wit and charm Caroline Blackwood posessed (as is evident with her writings) The little excerpts from her fiction and non-fiction works scattered throughout the length of the biography were very important, as I think they fit perfectly with what Miss Schoenberger had been describing within Caroline's life. They provided a lot of insight into what was happening in her life, in an almost poetical manner. There is no doubt that the author has a strong talent for writing, but I think the fact that different members of Caroline Blackwood's family refused to contribute hurt Nancy Schoenberger's effort for a deeper story. All in all, by the end of the book, I definitely wanted more to read. The author's fluid style of writing fit the subject matter well and it wasn't repetitive or dull by any means. I was however, disappointed with one aspect of the novel, and that is why wasn't more written about the development as Lady Caroline as a writer? I've read a few of her books, and she is obviously extremely talented in the area of psychological prose...there was more emphasis put on Caroline Blackwood's relationships than what was really the most fascinating thing about her, and that was her ability to so vividly and acutely write a novel of the psychological aspect...that was her true genius, not the fact that she was beautiful and had famous husbands. Too bad that wasn't put across, and that that's what Caroline will be remembered for, instead of what she *should*. Nevertheless a great biography by Nancy Schoenberger, given what she had to work with.