There has been quite a resurgence of interest lately in the work of Caroline Blackwood, with re-publications of several titles from her body of work.
Despite being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1977 with her novel Great Granny Webster, Caroline Blackwood is probably not best known for her writing. Heiress to the Guinness fortune, Blackwood was celebrated as a great beauty and dazzling ‘muse’ courtesy of her high-profile marriages first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell.
Born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster, she was presented as a debutante in 1949, before eloping with Lucian Freud a mere three years later. Throughout the 1960’s she worked as a columnist for various London magazines and was known for her mordant wit before her first book For All That I Found There was published in 1973.
Two of her short works are newly available – The Stepdaughter (which is a novella) and The Fate of Mary Rose (just slightly longer than novella length at 204 pages) – and both are marked by a brooding darkness, particularly in the fraught relationship between parents and children.
The Stepdaughter
This is a taut epistolary novella focusing on J. – a woman in her thirties living in New York – who is writing long angry letters in her head to no one in particular. The source of her ire is her absent husband Armold and her stepdaughter Renata. Arnold has absconded to France, leaving J with their daughter Sally Ann, Monique, a young French housemaid and Renata, his stepdaughter who has come to live with them following her real mother’s institutionalisation. J is very well off, Arnold takes care of that, but despises Renata, who is a large, sullen girl whose only concession to hobbies is eating the lumpen cakes she makes daily. J’s resentment towards Renata is taking over her life, poisoning her relationship with Sally Ann and effectively keeping them all prisoner in this stylish, modern apartment.
It’s clear to the reader that Renata is suffering from trauma and a lack of love; losing her mother, abandoned by her father and ignored by her stepmother, but J is blinded by her misplaced anger. The more she broods, the more she realises that while she wishes to be free of this girl, she may actually need to keep her close, believing that Arnold is only paying for such a large apartment because Renata needs somewhere stable to live.
The Stepdaughter is light on plot, focusing instead on J’s unstable fixation on the girl she believes is ruining her life, when in fact it is she who is ruining Renata’s life. It is only when Renata is freed from the bonds of her parents that she can make a decision for herself and bring about some kind of consolation for J also.
Would that plump and lonely girl, who had been made to feel that her whole life was nothing more than an undesirable accident, have in the end always felt she was forced to vanish into the dark as if in some forlorn way she was really searching for herself when she looked in the cold savage streets of New York for the undesirable accident?
This is a dark little novel, centred solely within a confused mind, which neatly explores how we look to the failings in others to avoid looking closer at the failings within ourselves.
The Fate of Mary Rose
Rowan Anderson is a London-based historian who thinks he has it all. Following a very brief dalliance and necessary marriage six years previously, he has ensconced his compliant but inscrutable wife Cressida in a cottage in a nearby sleepy village along with their daughter Mary Rose, while he remains living in London, enjoying life with his lover Gloria. He visits Mary Rose and Cressida once a month, loathing the strained politeness and claustrophobic atmosphere of the cottage, but seeing it as a small price to pay for his freedom.
When a young girl called Maureen Sutton is brutally murdered in the village, everything changes. Cressida’s thin veneer of middle-class respectability begins to slip as she becomes maniacally obsessed with the Sutton murder and takes increasingly frightening steps to ensure the safety of her beloved daughter Mary Rose. As Cressida’s behaviour becomes more unhinged, Rowan finds himself in a situation he has never wanted – having to care about the fate of his child.
Like The Stepmother, The Fate of Mary Rose features a mother whose own behaviour is having a detrimental affect on the life of her child. Yet, while Cressida is depicted as being mentally unstable, Blackwood also forces the reader to confront the damage that Rowan is doing, simply by remaining absent. Both parents are selfish in their own ways, Cressida with a surfeit of love and Rowan with none at all.
Can Rowan finally take some responsibility and remove his daughter from a detrimental home life? And just what was he doing on the night that Maureen Sutton went missing. Blackwood teases on both these fronts and when the narrative comes to a head it is both dramatic and ambiguous. Where the book succeeds is in its vital depiction of collective hysteria and maternal obsession and like The Stepdaughter, it succeeds by portraying a lost and lonely young girl at the centre of a storm, lacking either the agency or the support to weather it.
