Great Granny Webster

Caroline Blackwood

NYRB

In Caroline Blackwood’s slim novel Great Granny Webster (NYRB), set in Britain in the 1940s, a teenage girl is sent to live with her great-grandmother in a life­less Victorian man­sion near Brighton. Sea air has been rec­om­mended for her ane­mia, but the girl, who is never named, rarely gulps fresh air or fresh any­thing else in Granny’s cold, ster­ile house. Still, she is curi­ous about the old woman’s appar­ent deter­mi­na­tion to be mis­er­able. After she recov­ers, she ques­tions rel­a­tives and fam­ily friends in hopes of com­ing to under­stand the for­bid­ding Great Granny Webster. With sym­pa­thy, Blackwood uncov­ers a fam­ily tree of female despair: the ethe­real grand­mother Dunmartin, insti­tu­tion­al­ized when she turns vio­lent; the fab­u­lously social Aunt Lavinia, who doesn’t want her sui­ci­dal angst to spoil the party; and the thor­oughly unpleas­ant matri­arch, for­ever gloomy in a hard-backed chair. The prose is spare, invit­ing and play­ful. Blackwood was crit­i­cized for the obvi­ous auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal ele­ment of this novel when it was first pub­lished in 1977, but her unusual style and sharp pow­ers of obser­va­tion make Great Granny Webster a com­pelling read.