Book cover of Great Granny Webster

Book description

A “shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny” novel that offers a behind-the-scenes look at the lives of eccentric aristocrats (Jonathan Raban, author of Bad Land)

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Great Granny Webster as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I read all of Blackwood’s novels and stories when researching my first biography, on the life of Caroline Blackwood. This is the one that stayed with me, Blackwood’s semi-autobiographical novella of Dunmartin Manor, housing three generations of Websters and Dunmartins. From the cold cruelty of the narrator’s great grandmother, to the fairy-like madness of her grandmother, and the tragedy of her fun-loving but suicidal Aunt Lavinia, all seem like extensions of the mansion—a decaying, grand old house, freezing in the winter, sweltering in the summer, and given to flooding. Like the house itself, the characters are trapped by the…

From Nancy's list on gothic tales of houses.

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