Caroline Blackwood

Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996), known as Caroline Blackwood, 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. Her husbands were accomplished figures in their own fields.

Early life

Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood was born on 16 July 1931 at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. Her parents, the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and Maureen Constance Guinness, were both from Anglo-Irish families.

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

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

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?" During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the American founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books.

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 and won the David Higham Prize for best first novel.

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

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, was published in 1984.

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 explores the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities.

Published works Blackwood published 10 books during her lifetime. Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood was published posthumously. Novels

The Stepdaughter (1976) Great Granny Webster (1977) The Fate of Mary Rose (1981) Corrigan (1984)

Collections

For All That I Found There (1973) Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983) Never Breathe a Word: The Collected Stories of Caroline Blackwood (2010)

Other

(with Anna Haycraft) Darling, You Shouldn’t Have Gone to So Much Trouble (1980) On the Perimeter (1984) In the Pink (1987) The Last of the Duchess (1995)

Personal life Blackwood was married three times, and had four children.

Lucian Freud, married 9 December 1953, divorced 1959. Israel Citkowitz, married 15 August 1959, divorced 1972, three daughters, including Natalya, Eugenia, and Ivana 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.

Ten years later, in 1987, she moved 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.

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