Great Granny Webster

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590170076
Pages: 128
Publication Date: June 30, 2002

Narrated by an unnamed 14-year-old female, this masterful novella is equal parts macabre fairy-tale and blackly humorous family portrait. Without being overly self-conscious in its artlessness, it reads like the guileless confession of a simple innocent embroiled in a tangled net of ravaged and ruined lives. There’s a marvelous simplicity to the tale.
—Lucy Scholes, Literary Hub

Shocking, brilliant, and wickedly funny, Great Granny Webster is Caroline Blackwood's best book. In the monstrous old dowager of Hove, and the ruling class she represents, Blackwood found a subject grandly commensurate with her own extraordinary style of aghast relish.
— Jonathan Raban

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

Blackwood’s magnificent works are like pure odes to odium, her prose cuttingly matter-of-fact. . . She should be hailed as one of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived.
—Virginia Feito, CrimeReads