New York Review Books Classics

"None of us will forget Caroline Blackwood's Great Granny Webster, a matter-of-fact account--and all the grimmer for this matter-of-factness--of the temperamental and circumstantial misfortunes of an Ulster family. Although it's deceptively concise, it evokes the spirits of no less than four ages--Victorian, Edwardian, pre- and postwar--in exact and resonant prose...A unique literary experience." -- Philip Larkin

"Blackwood loves monsters. No character in modern literature is more obdurately monstrous than Great Granny Webster. An Edwardian relic, this utterly pleasureless, stingy, censorious, ossified banshee, forever ensconced in her painfully stiff chair before a fireplace laid but never lit, is the stuffed and essentially powerless dragon of a musty castle, the remnant of hidebound and pointless traditional values, someone who has never in her life given anyone a reason to like her." -- Gary Indiana, Bookforum

"Great Granny Webster feels more like a memoir than a novel...but it is as gripping as a whodunit. There are passages like passages in a strange house: when they turn a corner, something unexpectedly shocking comes into sight. It is also very funny, and the characters are vividly eccentric--or just plain vivid: Blackwood's writing never merely trundles along." -- Gabriele Annan, The Times Literary Supplement