Caroline Blackwood

This is the fascinating and startling story of journalist and novelist Caroline Blackwood's search for the late Duchess of Windsor. In 1980, the London Sunday Times commissioned Lord Snowdon to photograph the Duchess, who was then living outside of Paris, and Blackwood was asked to go along to report. But it is Maitre Suzanne Blum, one of the most powerful lawyers in France, who becomes the central figure of Blackwood's story. Fierce and controlling, Blum holds the Duchess a virtual prisoner in her grand but now shuttered house in the Bois de Boulogne, keeping away all visitors. In Blum, Blackwood brings to life a wily old Gorgon -- alternately vulnerable and ruthless, paranoid and perverse -- who has begun interweaving her life with that of the Duchess. It is from Blackwood's talks with such colorful contemporaries of the Duchess as Lady Monckton, Lady Diana Cooper, and Lady Mosley and from her own encounter with Maitre Blum that Blackwood is able to evoke brilliantly the life and exploits of Wallace Warfield Simpson Windsor as well as her bizarre and sinister relationship with Suzanne Blum. - Jacket flap.

When a young girl is found horribly murdered in the woods, Cressida sends for her estranged husband to protect their daughter and discovers that he cannot recall his whereabouts on the night of the murder.

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. 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.

Mirabel Rainwood was a born matriarch, and it was her influence which kept the family together. Living within a small radius, the numerous members of all generations met not only for Occasions but for Mirabel's traditional tea at Brendon Lodge on the first Saturday of every month. Bridget, 'the stepdaughter', had always remained on the fringe of the family. It was when Felix's engagement to Susan Rainwood surprised them all that they began to feel that they should really do more about Bridget, keep an eye on her. For everyone had expected the boy-and-girl friendship between Felix and Bridget to end in marriage, and indeed Bridget herself had never thought otherwise. To have the family's attention focused on her, both at the wedding and later, proved to be a mixed blessing to Bridget, although Mirabel's concern for her was genuine, and the sympathy of Robert Rainwood came to mean a great deal.

366 p. ; 24 cm