Great Granny Webster [Paperback]

Caroline Blackwood (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 28, 1993

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 an alternate 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 an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

With crisp, detached economy (only a little over 100 pages), Blackwood's unnamed and rather faceless narrator gives us her genteel but bizarre family history. There's Great Granny Webster, who lives on and on and on in the role of England's leading kill-joy - doing nothing, despising pleasure, never smiling, hoarding money, sitting in a straight-backed chair in a house in a "stagnant suburb" near Brighton. And then there's Great Granny's daughter, the narrator's Grandmother, who has long been in an asylum - she tried to kill her grandson (crying "bad blood!") at his christening - but before that had a romantically fey reign at her long-suffering husband's run-down castle in Ulster, where she became obsessed with elves and fairies. And the third aberrant generation is represented by Aunt Lavinia (the mad-woman's daughter), a much-married play-girl and devil-may-care girl prone to chic suicide attempts (she finally succeeds). All these weirdnesses are reported with a slightly edgy calm, an odd tone perhaps intended to make us wonder whether this matter-of-fact narrator hasn't herself been infected by the family looniness - especially since, on the last page, Great Granny Webster's white cremated remains (she has finally died) are accidentally blown all over the narrator's black funeral clothes. This final scene, like all the others in Blackwood's cool follow-up to her dark Step-Daughter debut (1977), catches the eye and interest without ever touching anything in the remote area of the heart. (Kirkus Reviews)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: Imprint unknown; New edition edition (October 28, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1898436037
• ISBN-13: 978-1898436034
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,971,676 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 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.

6 of 7 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.