Great Granny Webster [Hardcover]

Caroline Blackwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1977

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.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From 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, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Review

"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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 135 pages
• Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd (September 1977)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0715611909
• ISBN-13: 978-0715611906
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,283,081 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dark, grimly funny novella, December 2, 2003

By 

Cynthia S. Froning "astrocyn" (Longmont, CO United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Granny Webster (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Great Granny Webster is a short, pointed look at three generations of eccentric, damaged women from the point of view of their descendant, a young girl. The portraits of the rigid, determinedly unhappy Great Granny Webster, her flighty, insane daughter, and the outwardly frivolous but suicidal granddaughter are classic black comedy, amusing and depressing together. The women dominate the story; the men are either dead (the narrator's father), absent (her brother), or ineffectual (her grandfather). The book is short, but the characters are affecting and vividly portrayed.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A behind-the-scenes look at a wacky aristocratic family", August 31, 2004

By 

William T. Keith "Portico Magazine" (Birmingham, Alabama) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Great Granny Webster (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

Blackwood was the heir to the Guinness beer fortune, and she was quite the bohemian rebelling against her wealthy family. Great Granny Webster is a partly autobiographical novel and a behind-the-scenes look at a great, wacky aristocratic family.

13 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Not worth a re-issue, June 28, 2002

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Great Granny Webster (New York Review Books Classics) (Paperback)

NYRB Classics was started a few years ago with the intention of re-issuing neglected cult favorite books which had fallen out of print; though many of their choices have been superb, a very few leave you scratching your head, wondering who is making the choices.

GREAT GRANNY WEBSTER is one such choice. By all accounts, Caroline Blackwood was a fascinating woman: heriess to the Guinness fortune, she counted among her [physical] conquests Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, and was a bewitching raconteur and bon vivant. But she wasn't much of a writer. Blackwood seemed never to have learned the lesson that a good fiction writer must show rather than tell. As a result, in this novel she tells us and tells us and tells us again what a monster the title character is, but Great-Granny Webster herself doesn't actually do much but sit around and show poor hospitality to her guests and relations. Yet still the narrator keeps fulminating against her for crimes mostly implied rather than real; as in Caroline Blackwood's final book, THE LAST OF THE DUCHESS, where she simultaneously weighed in again and again against the Duchess of Windsor's female lawyer, you begin to develop a perverse sympathy for the object of Blackwood's fury.

Even had this book accomplished what it set out to do it wouldn't have been much: the two main characters, Great-Granny Webster and Aunt Lavinia, seem like nothing readers haven't already seen (respectively) in Dickens and Evelyn Waugh.