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Before she took up writing in her 40s, Lady Caroline Blackwood was more famous as a muse than an artist, having married the painter Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz and the poet Robert Lowell. Her second novel, Great Granny Webster, was her masterpiece – a mordantly funny, Gothic comedy based on her unhappy childhood growing up in Clandeboye, Co Down, as a Guinness heiress and the scion of an Anglo-Irish aristocracy that was in its twilight. The book – in truth more memoir than novel – was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977. Blackwood had a spare, matter-of-fact prose style and a wicked, often macabre, sense of humour that is also evident in many of her wonderful first-person journalism pieces, including a hilarious account of a gravediggers strike in Liverpool during Britain's Winter of Discontent. Her witness account of Francis Bacon loudly heckling Princess Margaret's efforts to sing is one of the funniest pieces of writing I've ever read. But Great Granny Webster, a monstrous old dowager, rattling around an Ulster mansion like some inebriated wraith, remains her most enduring creation.
Other favourites: Edna O'Brien and Maeve Binchy.
"She took one of her poodle's charcoal biscuits out of the packet and ate it herself. 'Either these are quite delicious or quite disgusting. Like many things in life, it's rather hard to tell which,' she said."
– From Great Granny Webster, by Caroline Blackwood
Paul Howard is the creator of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. Breaking Dad is currently running at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre.
