Caroline Blackwood was the daughter of an aristocratic family, yet she grew up hungry in a crumbling Irish mansion while her mother partied in London. By thirty, she had married the grandson of Sigmund Freud, been pursued by Picasso on a Paris rooftop, and defied the future her mother had planned for her. By fifty, she had buried her father, two husbands, and a teenage daughter. She spent her final two decades transforming all of it into some of the most remarkable and bitterly funny prose of the century.
Born Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood on July 16, 1931, in Knightsbridge, she was the middle child of Basil, the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and Maureen Guinness, one of the famous “Golden Guinness Girls” of Dublin society. Her father inherited his title while on his honeymoon after his own father’s sudden death. Her mother was the daughter of Ernest Guinness, whose family had turned a Dublin porter brewery into one of the most profitable enterprises in the British Isles. The family’s Irish estate, Clandeboye, near Belfast in County Down, had been in the Blackwood family since the 17th century.
The first marquess had designed its park, dug a lake shaped like a shamrock, and filled the halls with plunder from his imperial career in India. By Caroline’s childhood, the building was mortgaged heavily due to family gambling debts. Rain poured through the roof so consistently that servants kept rubber boots by the door, and the rooms were so cold that walking through the corridors required an overcoat. The children’s nursery was run by a series of neglectful governesses.
Food was irregular at best. According to a Telegraph account of her life, Caroline once became so hungry she begged scraps from villagers, while her younger brother, heir to a vast brewing fortune, developed rickets. One governess reportedly held her brother Sheridan out of an upstairs window to stop him from humming. Maureen, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, was one of the most extravagantly controversial comic figures in mid-century London.
She kept a device under her dress that made rude noises at dinner parties, received guests disguised as an Irish maid with false teeth, and wore deliberately obscene fake noses to shock duchesses. Cecil Beaton, who knew everyone and liked almost none of them, placed her at the top of his list of London women he could not stand. She was closest, and most competitive, with the Queen Mother. What Caroline learned from watching this rarely present mother was, in the words of Christopher Isherwood, to think only negatively.
She grew up shy, intelligent, cautious, and entirely lacking the confidence her position should have given her. Her education was scattered and irregular. What she acquired instead was a practical knowledge of grand decaying houses, servants who knew more than their employers, and relatives who behaved terribly in beautiful rooms. The only adult who might have changed the family’s course was her father.
Basil joined the government in the 1930s, but his career was later described by Irish biographies as brilliant at first, then ruined by alcoholism. When war broke out, he joined the Royal Horse Guards, and by 1945 he was a captain in Burma leading a field broadcasting unit that brought loudspeakers to the front lines, calling on Japanese positions to surrender. On March 25, 1945, at age 35, he was killed in action. His body was never found.
The marquessate passed to his young son Sheridan. Caroline was thirteen. She barely knew her father, and now the chance to know him was gone forever. In London, people began murmuring a phrase that would follow the family for the rest of the century: “The Guinness curse.
” The practical consequences came faster than the legendary ones. Widowed at 38 with three small children, Maureen bought Clandeboye outright for £192,000 and placed it in a company she established. In 1966, she gave the estate to her son as a wedding gift. The brewery itself continued generating enormous profits that made all of this affordable.
In 1949, Caroline was presented to society at a debutante ball held at the Londonderry House. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret were among the guests. The evening became legendary when Maureen, having drunk too much champagne, fell on the dance floor and broke the family’s shamrock-shaped tiara. Caroline was described as the most beautiful girl of the season, largely due to her heart-shaped face and wide, gray-blue eyes that one observer compared to eagles’ eggs.
The composer Ned Rorem remembered her as beautiful but elusive, a very blond girl with eyes the color of Persian carpets who never spoke, only smoked. What no one saw that night was the terror beneath her composure. She suffered, as the Telegraph later described it, from pathological shyness. She treated it with sharp, caustic wit that made friends admire her and enemies fear her.
She was, by nature, entirely unsuited to the season’s marriage market. So she did something rarely done by marquesses’ daughters in 1950: she got a job. She joined the publisher Hallton as a secretary, working in the building that produced Picture Post, Britain’s most successful illustrated magazine. There, the radical journalist Claud Cockburn noticed her and began giving her small journalistic assignments.
For the first time, someone cared about what she observed rather than how she looked while observing it. Around this time, at a party given by Lady Rothermere, Caroline met a painter. He was ten years older, already married, famous, and already the most talked-about young artist in London. His grandfather had invented psychoanalysis.
His name was Lucian Freud. Freud was fascinated by the eighteen-year-old at the Rothermere party, and she was fascinated by him for reasons that had as much to do with her mother as with him. He was, from Maureen’s perspective, a perfectly engineered insult: a painter, a commoner, a married man of Jewish origin, and in financial distress. Caroline later noted with pleasure that her mother had never heard of Sigmund Freud.
In 1952, the couple left England for Paris, booking rooms at the Hotel La Louisiane in Saint-Germain. There began Caroline’s career as the most scrutinized face in British painting. Freud worked then in a style he described as close observation, sitting extremely near his subject for long periods, producing what he later called involuntary magnification of features. In her case, that meant the eyes, which appear in the finished paintings less like anatomy than like weather.
The painting “Girl in Bed,” from 1952, is a small work, 18 inches by 12 inches, showing a young woman lying down with her head on a pillow and her hand raised near her face. The sheets around her are painted with the same precision most painters reserve for faces. She looks about twelve years old. Caroline’s verdict on the whole series was typically dry: the results were only half her work because they were Lucian’s vision, and the sitter had not added much.
She was wrong about that. Everyone who stands before the painting knows it. The Paris year produced the one anecdote she told for the rest of her life, involving a summons to Picasso’s studio. The old man painted her bitten fingernails, invited her upstairs to see his bathroom, and then lunged at her on the rooftop, as she described, while Freud waited below.
She called Picasso a lecherous old man and reportedly refused to wash her hands for three days afterward. On December 9, 1953, she married Freud. Freud’s account of Maureen’s reaction, given decades later to the journalist Geordie Greig, was that his mother-in-law was corrupt and vicious, and he went so far as to claim she paid people to kill him, an allegation for which no evidence exists beyond his own word. What is documented is that the marriage lasted only briefly compared to the length of time the paintings documented it.
The couple returned to London and settled in the bohemian district around Dean Street. Caroline took the salon life of Belgravia and replaced it with private drinking sessions in a Soho street where the barman insulted customers as a form of service. Francis Bacon was always present, devoted to Freud, while Cyril Connolly hovered on the edges, equally devoted to Caroline. For about three years, she was at the center of the most interesting artistic circle in England.
She was also the one with money. When Freud needed money for Bacon, she gave it to him without asking what it was for. What Caroline found was that alcohol removed her shyness entirely. The Irish biographical record states plainly that she found it impossible to live with Freud and took to drink, which liberated her from herself.
That refuge became a permanent residence, and remained so for the next four decades. The paintings from the final stage of the marriage record a precise deterioration. “Girl Reading” shows Caroline from above, her eyes cast down, denying the viewer that famous gaze entirely. “Girl in a Green Dress” shows her staring at the horizon.
Then, in 1954, Freud returned to the same Paris hotel where the first paintings were made and painted the picture that ended the conversation. “Hotel Bedroom” is the most uncomfortable painting either of them ever made. Caroline lies on a narrow bed, fingers on her cheek. Her face is pale and prematurely aged, looking away toward a window.
Freud stands behind her in the shadowed half of the painting, fully dressed, dark, observing, attached to the wall as if he has just entered or is about to leave. Critics called it a uniquely intimate autobiography. The Telegraph described the painted woman’s expression as desperate and numb. Blackwood wrote of it herself that she was horrified.
Some who examined the painting later suggested the woman in bed was not so much depressed as extremely drunk. Both interpretations are true at once. This was the last portrait Freud painted of her. The marriage collapsed within two years of its completion.
Accounts differ on the timing, but the scene she told friends was simple and domestic: a meal she had gone to great trouble to prepare, and a husband who pushed the plate away. She went to a hotel, then to Italy. When Freud followed and asked her to come back, she refused. Bacon, who understood his friend’s nature, apparently feared Freud would harm himself.
Freud did nothing of the sort. Maureen’s reaction was recorded by Geordie Greig, one of the rare moments her mother’s voice reaches us directly: a triumphant verdict in three repeated words: “It was wonderful. ” Caroline had escaped a marriage her mother hated, and Maureen treated the collapse as a personal victory rather than her daughter’s misfortune. Caroline was 25, twice notorious, without a career or a degree, with a face already immortalized by an artist.
She departed for America. In New York, she found a man who was almost the exact opposite of Lucian Freud, and married him. She had first passed through Hollywood in the mid-1950s, where she spent time with the screenwriter Ivan Moffat and spoke vaguely of wanting to become an actress. That talk continued when she moved to New York in 1957, where she attended Stella Adler’s acting school and worked as a model for Vogue.
Then her acting career quietly faded. Instead, she found Israel Citkowitz, a composer 22 years her senior, a pupil of Aaron Copland. They married on August 15, 1959, and bought a brownstone in Greenwich Village. For a woman who had grown up in a cold Irish house among strangers, the early years of that marriage were the closest she ever came to traditional family life.
She had three daughters: Natalya, Eugenia, and Ivana. By the time Ivana was born in 1966, the marriage was effectively over. In the mid-1960s, Caroline began a long relationship with Robert Silvers, co-founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books. He remained a family friend afterward, and he, along with Ivana herself, believed for years that he was Ivana’s father.
The truth, which Caroline concealed for 30 years and revealed only on her deathbed, was that Ivana’s father was Ivan Moffat, the screenwriter from the California period. Ivana later noted wryly that her first name might have been a clue. There was a pattern in that family that Caroline specifically should have noticed. The Guardian stated it plainly in reviewing Ivana’s memoir: Maureen’s neglect of Caroline was mirrored in Caroline’s neglect of Ivana.
The child who had starved in a mansion with an absent mother had now become the absent mother, drinking in the evening while others cared for the children. In 1970, Caroline returned to London, renting the upper floors of a house in Redcliffe Square in Chelsea. In April of that year, the most famous poet in America entered this vertical arrangement. Robert Lowell was 53, a Pulitzer Prize winner in his thirties, and the leading figure in American poetry.
He also suffered from what is now known as bipolar disorder, cycling between manic episodes that hospitalized him and then prompted apologies. He was married to the writer and critic Elizabeth Hardwick. Lowell met Caroline again at a cocktail party hosted by his English publishers. She was 38, beautiful in a way that had become more striking with time, and she spoke a style he had never heard on either side of the Atlantic.
Within weeks, he moved in with her. The literary consequences for Hardwick were immediate and cruel. Lowell began writing the sonnet sequence that became “The Dolphin,” his name for Caroline, drawing parts of it from Hardwick’s letters to him, quoting directly from the correspondence of the woman he had left. Elizabeth Bishop, his closest friend among poets and the one whose judgment he trusted most, read the manuscript and advised him plainly not to publish it.
He published it in 1973 and won his second Pulitzer Prize. In the poems, Caroline appears as a dolphin, a killer whale, and a mermaid feeding on the bones of her exhausted lovers. They had a son, named Sheridan, in 1971, after the family lineage that ran back to the playwright through her dead father. Lowell also became stepfather to Ivana, writing her a sonnet by that name, and was by many accounts a kind man during his periods of health.
After his divorce was finalized, they married on October 21, 1972, making this Caroline’s third marriage. They moved to the country, to a house that must be seen to be believed. Milgate Park, near Bearsted outside Maidstone in Kent, is a vast listed building with murals on the staircase, dating back to an Elizabethan knight. When Caroline bought it, the structure was closer to a burden than a home, described by visitors of that period as decrepit, chaotic, and as cold as a tomb.
This was Clandeboye as she had known it as a child. She had acquired, without any apparent irony, a second Clandeboye. The house was the most productive and least stable of Caroline’s life, housing a seriously mentally ill American poet, an Anglo-Irish novelist with alcoholism, three daughters, a young son, a procession of staff, and a stream of literary visitors who left in a state of bewilderment. Lowell himself described the arrangement in a phrase friends repeated for years: he was manic, Caroline was panicking, and their relationship was like breaking eggs.
Lowell’s manic episodes were frightening and sometimes absurd, with accounts of him eating washing powder and comparing himself to Mussolini addressing a crowd of admirers. Caroline’s alcoholism was steadier and quieter, then became permanent. Her sister-in-law Lindy, who later ran the Clandeboye estate, gave the least sentimental view of the subject, saying Caroline was nasty and extremely boring when she drank. Yet these were the years when she finally began writing books.
Lowell, whatever his condition, took her seriously as a writer before anyone else did. He encouraged her to collect her journalism and stories into her first book in 1973. She called it “For All That I Found There. ” The reviews were good, the sales modest, and most importantly, at 42, she stopped being the subject of other people’s writing.
The marriage lasted about five years, and by the summer of 1977 it was over. Lowell left Caroline in Ireland and traveled to New York. He was 60, returning to Elizabeth Hardwick, the wife he had left seven years before and to whom he had remained attached throughout, including through the book that used her letters against her. On September 12, 1977, he arrived at JFK Airport from London and took a cab into Manhattan.
Among his luggage was a bag of notes for new poems. He was also carrying a brown-paper-wrapped package containing “Girl in Bed,” the small painting Lucian Freud had made of Caroline in a Paris hotel room 25 years earlier. During that ride across town, Lowell suffered a heart attack. The cab reached the building on the Upper West Side where Hardwick lived, and the driver found his passenger collapsed in the back seat.
The doorman went upstairs to fetch Hardwick. According to Caroline Blackwood’s obituary in The New York Times, when Elizabeth Hardwick opened the cab door, she found her ex-husband’s body holding a picture of the woman he had left her for. According to The New Yorker, hospital staff had to pry the painting from his hands. The documented details are these: the date was September 12, 1977, the painting was Freud’s “Girl in Bed,” and he was dead in the back seat when the cab arrived.
What no one could say was why he was carrying it, or what he intended to do with it when he went upstairs. He was buried in New Hampshire in the family cemetery at Dunbarton. Caroline was 46, twice divorced, now widowed, and her marriage was already over. She learned what had happened and what he had been carrying from people who phoned her in Ireland.
The worst year of her life was still ahead. Nine months after Lowell’s death, on June 22, 1978, her eldest daughter Natalya died at 17. The recorded cause was positional asphyxia due to an overdose, a medical term for the end of a girl who had grown up in the chaos of Redcliffe Square and Milgate. The British tabloid press did what it had done in 1945 when her father was killed in Burma: it exploited the story of a cursed family and its growing fortune.
Caroline’s published work never mentions Natalya, neither then nor later. Instead, she continued working, and her work over the next decade was the most composed of her literary career. All her books are short, none exceeding 200 pages, and all are about a family inflicting hidden harm on its members. “The Stepdaughter” (1976) won a prize for best first novel.
“Great Granny Webster” (1977), a novel of barely a hundred pages about four generations of an Anglo-Irish family stretching back to Dunmartin Hall, the leaking mansion of her childhood, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. According to one Irish biography of her career, it did not win because the chairman of the judges, Philip Larkin, considered it memoir rather than fiction. John Betjeman’s verdict was just two words: he called the book wicked, in its most admiring sense. Lowell watched her write it, leaving his own judgment in a poem addressed to her: out of her wreckage, her beauty, her wealth, her courage, and her madness, came her book and her crippled legacy of deprivation.
Her next victim was waiting in a locked house in the Bois de Boulogne, guarded by a lawyer in her eighties. In 1980, The Sunday Times sent Caroline Blackwood to Paris to interview Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, the American divorcée for whom Edward VIII had abdicated the British throne. The duchess was by then very old and very ill, and entirely unavailable. Since 1976, she had given control of her affairs to her French lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum.
Blum decided who could contact her client, which was no one, and what could be said about her, which was very little. What Blackwood produced from this obstruction is one of the strangest books of that decade, because instead of abandoning the assignment, she turned her attention to the woman who had blocked her. “The Last of the Duchess” describes a series of meetings with Blum, portrayed as an elderly lawyer so possessive of her famous client that The New York Times, in its review, described the attachment as almost erotic. Publication was delayed for years for legal reasons, and the book was only fully published after Blum’s death, reaching American readers through Pantheon in 1995.
It was the last book she published in her lifetime, and the clearest expression of her method, moving past the famous face in the bed to study who stood in the shadows. Her private life continued its familiar decline. Her alcoholism, which began in Soho bars in the early 1950s as a treatment for shyness, became the dominant feature of her life. Her daughter’s memoir records a woman who drank herself into oblivion most nights, making terrifying statements she retracted when she regained awareness.
Close friends described two completely different personalities in one person: one was the wittiest and most distinctive presence in London society, and the other was unreachable. Her mother, meanwhile, lived a vibrant social life into her eighties, her social position unaffected, having concluded long ago that her middle daughter’s career as a novelist was a whim best not discussed. In 1995, Maureen transferred assets worth £15 million directly to two of her grandchildren, a decision that Caroline’s sister and sister-in-law challenged in court without success. In that same year, Caroline learned she had cancer.
She traveled to New York, where the men who had painted and written about her had gone, and where her final audience was waiting. She spent her last weeks in a suite at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue, a decision entirely in character: she preferred the hotel to a home or a hospital. Friends came and went, drinks were served to visitors, and the conversation, by all accounts, remained unsentimental to the end. Then her mother arrived from London, 89 years old, on the Concorde, wearing a floor-length fur coat and followed by a set of luggage.
Maureen took a suite down the hall, sat beside her dying daughter, and the rest of the family did the only logical thing: they withdrew and left mother and daughter to finish a conversation that had been running since 1931. No one ever published what was said. Caroline used some of those final days to reveal one last secret, telling Ivana the truth about her father: that she was Ivan Moffat’s daughter and always had been. Lady Caroline Blackwood died on February 14, 1996, at 64.
The New York Times ran her obituary the next day, calling her a satirical novelist. Le Monde noted the death of a British writer who had rebelled against the world she was born into. Her mother survived her by two years, dying in London in 1998 at 91, and was buried at Clandeboye beside her son who had preceded her. The house Caroline wrote about as Dunmartin Hall still stands above the shamrock lake, and people now hold weddings in its courtyard.
“Girl in Bed” hangs today in the National Portrait Gallery in London, on loan from a private collection. Visitors stand before a picture of a 21-year-old girl with strange eyes, and mostly read the label rather than look at her face. That label ignores her brutal childhood in County Down, her four devastating short novels, Philip Larkin’s opinion that her stories were too true to be fiction, the ten books that bore her name in her lifetime, and the stories collected and published after her death. Three men immortalized her in oil and verse.
She described her family with scrupulous precision. The vast sums of money bought houses, governesses, seasons, and tiaras, but they never provided one warm room for the child who lived in it. Ivana published a memoir of the entire family 14 years after the funeral, and her portrayal of Caroline was as unsparing as anything Caroline ever wrote about Maureen.
Her books have returned to print, and the men who immortalized her now exist in libraries, at least the secondary characters of her story.