Sunday book pick: ‘Great Granny Webster’ is a handbook on how to remember someone who refuses to die

“I suddenly saw Great Granny Webster as awesome. She had outlived so many. She had managed to be both the start of a line and the end of a line. In my family she seemed to be Alpha and Omega.”

Caroline Blackwood’s 1977 novel, Great Granny Webster, shortlisted for the same year’s Man Booker Prize, was famously denied the winner status by the jury chair, poet and novelist Philip Larkin, for being an “autobiography and not fiction”. He so strongly held his opinion that he threatened to jump out the window should the rest of the jury disregard him.

Whatever the reason for Larkin’s caprice, the Man Booker Prize-losing Great Granny Webster is as fascinating as its author herself.

Born into fabulous wealth, Blackwood was the eldest of her four siblings and belonged to the British aristocracy. She had an unhappy childhood and after being presented as a debutante in London high society, would go on to have three high-profile marriages with painter Lucian Freud, composer Israel Citkowitz, and finally, poet Robert Lowell, much to her family’s disapproval. Much of her fiction reckoned with her aristocratic status and the “gothic excesses of material” as noted by writer Honor Moore, who introduces the NYRB Classics edition of the book.

An oppressive closeness

The novel is...

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