It all started with a two month stint of recovery at her great grandmother's, when the narrator was 14. Two years after World War II, Great Granny Webster's home appears to be still firmly rooted in an austere atmosphere. It's not just the house itself, or the single elderly maid Richards, but rather Great Granny Webster's own distaste of life itself .“I have nothing to live for any more,” she would murmur. I was always astonished by the way her tone sounded so smug and boastful.It soon becomes apparent though, that the narrator's Great Grandmother may not even be the most unusual member of the narrator's family. Her Aunt Lavinia's unorthodox and overtly ostentatious life style, can cause seemingly endless hours of fascination for all those who knew her. She believed in having “fun” as if it was a state of grace. Taking nothing seriously except amusement, she caused very little rancour, and although she was considered untrustworthy and wild and was reputed once to have gate-crashed a fashionable London party totally naked except for a sanitary towel, she managed to slip in and out of her many relationships, which she invariably described as “divine,” like an elegant and expensive eel.And then there was the narrators 'mysterious' grandmother, whom no one seemed to understand. The only remotely definite thing about her were the metaphorical alarm bells in people's heads.You must remember that your grandmother Dunmartin was a very different person from Great Granny Webster. From his earliest childhood your father had always lived in secret terror, never knowing what his mother was going to do or say.Great Granny Webster is basically a lengthy gossip-fest about the narrator's family. So really, a guilty pleasure reading material for any most women.The atmosphere of the book reminded me a lot of William Faulkner's A rose for Emily, where the town folk would find constant fascination with Miss Emily Grierson, even years after she's secluded herself from society.The foreword however bored me to tears. It reminded me rather painfully of all the tedious literary analyses that I had to study during high school. I nearly gave up on the book, after 3 pages.4.2/5 stars I could hardly put it down, especially since it's a relatively short story. Couldn't really say why I'm not giving it 5 whole stars, just that I wasn't as excited about it as I would've expected. Still, I recommend it to any fan of books with a heavy gothic atmosphere.
A very strange and unusual book, an exploration of an aristocratic and ancient English family, whose inheritance now seems to be only madness. This is undoubtably a very autobiographical book, much info coming from Honor Moore's introduction, and mostly it seems a psychoanalytical attempt for the author to explore her own psyche and how it was made up by her family, both in her experience and potentially literally inherited. For the shortness of the book it also has a very deep look at modern English history, swaying from the Victorian ideals of Great Granny Webster herself to the Edwardian excesses of Aunt Lavinia and the father and beyond to a skeptical and fleeing young girl. The horrible house of Dunmartin Manor also serves to remind one of a Bronte novel, in all its Gothic terror, except instead of ghosts its just coldness and dampness and leaks and bad food. Blackwood had a very interesting life, and though this book doesn't recount that per se, it does give a basis of a terrible inheritance that most likely dogs her throughout marriages to Lucian Freud and Robert Lowell, who died in a taxi with her portrait by Freud in his hands. Reading this one can help but feel bad for her, and admire her courage in tackling the weight of familial history with eyes wide open but sympathy for those ancestors who must have struggled like her.
Do You like book Great Granny Webster (2002)?
The anatomy of aristocracy, a crumbling castle with rotting pipes, impractical customs and haughty servants, as told from a child's perspective. Granny is much too pleasant a name for the matriarch of this clan, and her descendants derive endless pleasure from the evident misery of her stoical existence; her choice to isolate being one of self-preservation, while her dysfunctional relatives fare poorly in the swamp of civilization. A surprisingly thoughtful book on a deceptively sympathetic topic -- the hopeless progeny of money.
—E.C. McCarthy
I found a dog-eared, highlighted copy of this in the biographies section of the bookshop I work at. Having ascertained that it wasn't a biography (because if we put all semi-autobiographical novels in the bio section, literature would be a very empty shelf...), I decided it was worth a read, and small enough to fit into my handbag and pull out on the train, too.The sense of surroundings is what has really stuck with me - Great Granny Webster's horrifying cold house, Aunt Lavinia's pure white, luxurious London flat, the tragic collapsing family house at Dunmartin. Every story told is inexplicably linked with the place in which it is told, or the place about which it is told. Indeed, the final part, where the narrator's grandmother is descending into madness in the leaky, absurdly-run castle-house in Ireland, is a phantasmagorical Gothic story told through the horrified eyes of a modern young man - you can feel your toes get cold from his descriptions of the puddles on the floor.Each little vignette is fascinating, self-contained in its own world. Aunt Lavinia tells a story about Great Granny Webster, but you are really learning as much about the narrator and about Aunt Lavinia, and London in the 20s, as you are about the titular character. A book to read quickly, and consider slowly for a long time afterwards.
—Leah
This very brief novel concerns three generations of women in an upper-class British family in the early part of the 20th century, as seen by their teenaged descendant. Not much plot, lots of character description. Each of the women is decidedly eccentric: the incredibly repressed and overly upright title character, the narrator's insane grandmother Dunmartin, and her flighty yet suicidal Aunt Lavinia. I'm not sure whether these people are meant to provide an amusing portrait of the strangeness under the facade of a well-to-do family, or whether they are meant to represent the particular peculiarities of their respective eras. Either way, the book is an interesting read.
—Carol
