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Lady Caroline Blackwood

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Lady
Caroline Blackwood
Blackwood in 1953
Born
Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood

(1931-07-16)16 July 1931
London, England
Died14 February 1996(1996-02-14) (aged 64)
New York City, U.S.
OccupationWriter
Years active1973–1995
Spouses
​
​
(m. 1953; annulled. 1958)​
​
​
(m. 1959; div. 1972)​
​
​
(m. 1972; died. 1977)​
Children4, including Eugenia
Parents
Relatives
FamilyGuinness

Lady Caroline Blackwood (born Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood; 16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was an English writer, socialite, and muse. Her novels have been praised for their wit and intelligence. One of her works is an autobiography, which detailed her wealthy but unhappy childhood. She was born into an aristocratic British family, the eldest child of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and of Maureen Constance Guinness. All three of her husbands were accomplished figures in their own fields.

Early life

Blackwood and her mother Maureen Constance Guinness in 1933

Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood was born on 16 July 1931 at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home.[1] Her parents were Maureen Constance Guinness and Basil Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava.

Blackwood was, self-admittedly, "scantily educated" at Rockport School in County Down and Downham School near Essex,[2] among other schools.

In 1949, after a finishing school in Oxford, Blackwood was presented as a debutante at a ball held at Londonderry House.[3]

Career

Blackwood's first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails).

After marrying artist Lucian Freud in 1953, she became a figure in London's bohemian circles, the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replacing Belgravia drawing rooms. She sat for several of Freud's portraits, including Girl in Bed. She was impressed by the vision of Freud and painter Francis Bacon, and her later fiction was influenced by their view of humanity.

In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to Encounter, London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, feminist theatre and New York free schools. According to Christopher Isherwood, "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"[4] During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the American founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.[5][6]

Her third husband, American poet Robert Lowell, was an influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne". It includes a memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit.

Blackwood published her first novel The Stepdaughter (1976) three years later, and it received much acclaim. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel.

Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived from her own childhood. It depicted an old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the 1977 Booker Prize.[7]

The Last of the Duchess was completed in 1980. A study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her lawyer, Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995.

Blackwood's third novel, The Fate of Mary Rose (1981), describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen. It is narrated by a historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life.

After this, she completed a collection of five short stories, Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983). Her final novel, Corrigan (1984), was the least successful of her works.[citation needed]

Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp at RAF Greenham Common in Berkshire, and In The Pink (1987), which was a book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities.

Published works

Blackwood published 10 books during her lifetime. The Collected Stories was published posthumously.

  • Blackwood, Caroline (1973). For All That I Found There. George Braziller. ISBN 9780715607602
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1976). The Stepdaughter. Pocket Books. ISBN 9780671820404[8]
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1977). Great Granny Webster. New York Review Books. ISBN 9781590170076
  • Blackwood, Caroline with Haycraft, Anna (1980). Darling, You Shouldn't Have Gone to So Much Trouble. Jonathan Cape. ISBN 9780224018340
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1981). The Fate of Mary Rose. Summit Books. ISBN 9780140060638
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1983). Good Night Sweet Ladies. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140085228
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1984). Corrigan. NYRB Classics. ISBN 9781590170069
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1984). On the Perimeter. Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140083224
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1987). In the Pink. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9780747500506
  • Blackwood, Caroline (1995). The Last of the Duchess. Pantheon Books. ISBN 9780679439707
  • Blackwood, Caroline (2010). Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood. Counterpoint. ISBN 9781582435695

Personal life

Blackwood was married three times, and had four children.

In 1957, Blackwood moved to New York City and studied acting at the Stella Adler school.[citation needed]

Ann Fleming, the wife of Ian Fleming, introduced Blackwood to Lucian Freud. After they started seeing each other, the couple eloped in Paris on 9 December 1953.

By 1966, when Blackwood and Citkowitz's youngest, Ivana, was born,[9] their marriage was over. Citkowitz continued to live nearby and helped raise their daughters until his death.

During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books. He stayed close to the family thereafter.[5][6] According to Ivana, she and Silvers both suspected that he was her biological father.[9] But Blackwood revealed on her deathbed that Ivana's father was another lover: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat. He was a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his wife.[5][6]

On 22 June 1978, Natalya, Blackwood's eldest daughter with Citkowitz, died at age 17 from postural asphyxia due to a drug overdose.[9]

Blackwood and Lowell lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son. (Lowell's friend, fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop, strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored). Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and Blackwood reacted to his manic episodes with distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children.

In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, while in the back seat of a New York cab. He was returning to his former wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.[10]

In 1977, to avoid taxation, Blackwood left England and went to live in County Kildare, Ireland. She had an apartment at the great Georgian mansion of Castletown House, which was owned by her cousin Desmond Guinness.[citation needed]

Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large house in Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island in New York. Although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.[11]

Death

On 14 February 1996, Lady Caroline Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64.[12]

References

  1. ^ "Blackwood, Lady Caroline Maureen | Dictionary of Irish Biography". dib.ie. Retrieved 20 February 2023.
  2. ^ "Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline…". Goodreads. Retrieved 20 February 2023.
  3. ^ "The Question Is, Which Actress Should Play Lady Caroline Blackwood in a Hollywood Biopic?". Messy Nessy Chic. 18 November 2021. Retrieved 20 February 2023.
  4. ^ Schoenberger, Nancy (2012). Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood, n.p. Random House Digital, Inc.
  5. ^ a b c Brubach, Holly. "Their Better Half". The New York Times, 17 August 2010.
  6. ^ a b c Gaines, Steven. "Ivana Lowell, Sober Guinness Heiress Raised by Poet, Says What Happened". New York magazine, 19 September 2010.
  7. ^ "Great Granny Webster". Booker Prize. January 1977. Archived from the original on 28 October 2020. Retrieved 28 October 2020.
  8. ^ "The Evil Stepmother as Insult Comic". Los Angeles Review of Books. 6 August 2024. Retrieved 19 September 2024.
  9. ^ a b c Saner, Emine (4 December 2010). "Ivana Lowell: So, who was my father?". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved 10 January 2020.
  10. ^ Gonzalez, Alexander G. (2006). Irish Women Writers: An A-To-Z Guide, p. 24. Greenwood Publishing Group.
  11. ^ Blackwood, Caroline. "Francis Bacon (1909–1992)". New York Review of Books. ISSN 0028-7504. Retrieved 18 January 2021.
  12. ^ Kimmelman, Michael (15 February 1996). "Lady Caroline Blackwood, Wry Novelist, Is Dead at 64". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 19 February 2023.

Further reading

  • Davenport-Hines, Richard. "Caroline Blackwood" in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.
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