Book cover for Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

Great Granny Webster

2012 Released
128 Pages
2-3 Hours
Audiobook Unavailable
Hardback Unavailable
NYRB ClassicsISBN 9781590175385

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize

The real-life Guinness heiress offers an inside look at the lives of eccentric aristocrats in this “masterful . . . macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait” (Literary Hub).


This macabre, mordantly funny, partly auto-biographical novel reveals the gothic craziness behind the scenes in the great houses of the aristocracy, as witnessed through the unsparing eyes of an orphaned teenage girl. Great Granny Webster herself is a fabulous monster, the chilliest of matriarchs, presiding with steely self-regard over a landscape of ruined lives.

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 her name as a strikingly original writer.

Caroline Blackwood

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