Sandwiched between E C Bentley and William Boyd is the only novel I have by Caroline Blackwood, Great Granny Webster. It is a bleak tale shot through with black humour. A thinly disguised account of her unhappy childhood at Clandeboye in Northern Ireland, it is short enough to be classed as a novella, and is a minor masterpiece: what a damning and over-used expression but appropriate in this case.
Born in 1933, her parents were The Marquess and Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. Her mother had been born Maureen Guinness, a grand-daughter of the 1st Earl of Iveagh and with her sisters, Aileen and Oonagh, she was one of the “Fabulous Guinness Girls” in the 1920s, the IT girls of their generation.
Lady Caroline eloped with Lucien Freud and they married in 1953. The rather suggestive picture at the top of this post is of them together in Paris. They were only together for about four years but Freud painted her several times. Some of these pictures can be seen at the Ordovas gallery in Savile Row if you are quick; the exhibition finishes on Saturday 1st August.
She subsequently married the composer, Israel Citkovitz, and then the poet, Robert Lowell. The latter described her as “a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers”. Her last book is The Last of the Duchess, an account of the Duchess of Windsor’s relationship with her domineering lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; a sort of return to Great Granny Webster country. She died in 1996, aged 64, the year after it was published.
Fascinating loved every minute my father had an affair with Caroline Blackwood.