Great Granny Webster
By: Caroline Blackwood ; introduction by Honor Moore.
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 108
Subjects: Aristocracy (Social class) -- Fiction; Grandparent and child -- Fiction; Teenage girls -- Fiction; Grandmothers -- Fiction; Older women -- Fiction; Hove (England) -- Fiction
Genres: Fiction.
Description: 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.