Great Granny Webster

By Caroline Blackwood

Book Overview

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

The real-life Guinness heiress offers an inside look at the lives of eccentric aristocrats in this "masterful . . . macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait" (Literary Hub).

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.

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590170075
• ISBN13: 9781590170076
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: New York Review of Books
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.1" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Truly good.

It certainly didn't hurt to have your husband, Robert Lowell, peaking over your shoulder. A very fine book.

"A behind-the-scenes look at a wacky aristocratic family"

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.

Dark, grimly funny novella

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.