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The Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood (16 July 1931 – 14 February 1996) was a writer, and the eldest child of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness. A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood. She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at Rockport School in County Down, at Brilliantmont in Lausanne, and at Downham in Essex. After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House. Plump, ungainly and lacking in confidence as a teenager, she soon blossomed into a captivating blonde beauty with startlingly large blue eyes. ==Career== Blackwood’s first job was with Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by Claud Cockburn. Ann Fleming, the wife of "James Bond" author Ian Fleming, introduced Lady Caroline to Lucian Freud, and the two eloped to Paris in 1952. In Paris she met Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails), and after her and Freud's marriage on 9 December 1953 she became a striking figure in London's bohemian circles; the Gargoyle Club and Colony Room replaced Belgravia drawing rooms as her haunts. She sat for several of Freud's finest portraits, including ''Girl In Bed'', which testifies to her alluring beauty. She was impressed by the ruthless vision of Freud and Francis Bacon and her later fiction was a literary version of their view of humanity. In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to ''Encounter'', ''London Magazine'', and other periodicals on subjects such as beatniks, Ulster sectarianism, women's lib theatre and New York free schools. Although these articles were elegant, minutely observed and sometimes wickedly funny, they had, according to Christopher Isherwood, a persistent flaw: "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?"〔Schoenberger, Nancy (2012). (''Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood'' ), n.p. Random House Digital, Inc.〕 During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with Robert Silvers, the founder and co-editor of ''The New York Review of Books''.〔Brubach, Holly. ("Their Better Half" ). ''The New York Times'', 17 August 2010〕〔Gaines, Steven. ("Ivana Lowell, Sober Guinness Heiress Raised by Poet, Says What Happened" ). ''New York'' magazine, September 19, 2010〕 Her third husband, Robert Lowell, was a crucial influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book, ''For All That I Found There'' (1973), the title of which is a line from the Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne", and formed a coruscating memoir of her daughter’s treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood’s first novel ''The Stepdaughter'' (1976) appeared three years later to much acclaim, and is a concise and gripping monologue by a rich, self-pitying woman deserted by her husband in a plush New York apartment and tormented by her fat stepdaughter. It won the David Higham Prize for best first novel. ''Great Granny Webster'' followed in 1977 and was partly derived on her own miserable childhood, and depicted an austere and loveless old woman’s destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the Booker Prize. In 1980 came ''The Last of the Duchess'', a study of the relations between the Duchess of Windsor and her cunning lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum; it could not be published until after Blum’s death in 1995. Her third novel ''The Fate of Mary Rose'' (1981) describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen and is narrated by a selfish historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this came a collection of five short stories, ''Good Night Sweet Ladies'' (1983), followed by her final novel, ''Corrigan'' (1984), which was the least successful and depicts the effects on a depressed widow of a charming, energetic but sinister cripple who erupts into her life. Blackwood’s later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including ''On The Perimeter'' (1984), which focused her attentions on the women’s peace encampment at the Greenham Common air base in Berkshire, and ''In The Pink'' (1987), which was a reflective, ghoulish book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities and exposed the many obsessive personalities of both fox-hunters and animal rights activists. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Lady Caroline Blackwood」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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