Great Granny Webster is a great little novel by Caroline Blackwood. In 1977, it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and legend has it that the only reason Blackwood didn’t take home the award for her barely 100-page-long novella was that chair of the jury, Philip Larkin, threatened to jump out a window should his favourite lose out. What makes this slim book so convincing is, first and foremost, the playful and mischievous humour that permeates this gothic-feeling tale.
An unnamed fourteen-year-old girl is our narrator, guiding us through the novella’s four chapters, each dedicated to a woman in her family, resulting in a darkly humorous family history. The eponymous Great Granny Webster is a stern Scotswoman living in a high-backed Victorian chair in her dark and gloomy house in Hove, where our timid narrator is sent to spend the summer recuperating from minor surgery in the healthy sea air. The household our narrator enters is as severe as the matriarch who runs it, dutifully served by her one-eyed maid, Richards.
Next, we meet Aunt Lavinia, who lived fast and escaped the suffocating family estate, only to end up in an asylum as her highs were too high and her lows much too low. Another tragic yet mysterious figure is Lavinia’s mother and Great Granny Webster’s daughter, who lived the life of a captive in the family home, Dunmartin Hall, building ever closer relationships with the fairies as she was increasingly isolated from her family.
Woven between the glimpses into these women’s lives are other absurdities and bizarre habits of this declining aristocratic family — for example, how our narrator’s grandfather would have the women running the kitchen write out daily menus in French for their mistress to choose from, even though neither spoke a word of the language. The menus would be thrown out afterward, only for the women to cook their usual food.
In the slender shape of a novella, Caroline Blackwood has created a convincing portrait of four generations of women, all imprisoned by their eras and the social rules dominating them. Convention, motherhood, mental illness, men - there is always something to keep these women from leading free and happy lives.
Great Granny Webster is a dark fairy tale of a story about one tragically eccentric Anglo-Irish family leading a desperate but futile battle against social and financial decline, as embodied in its women’s mental deterioration. It is macabre, it is melancholy, it is a masterpiece of short fiction that I would highly recommend dedicating an afternoon to.
This edition published by New York Review Books, 2002.
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