Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) was born into an aristocratic Anglo-Irish family and was famous for much of her life largely on account of her flamboyantly bohemian existence, not to mention her tumultuous marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell. Taking up writing in middle age, she soon demonstrated that hers was a mind as brilliant and ruthless as any of the men for whom she'd served as "muse," producing reportage, fiction, biography, and even a cookbook.

Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels and is co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes. She's a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan, where she teaches at Columbia University.

"Contained and ferocious, at once disarmingly and ambiguously candid about blistering feelings which are made to seem commonplace and all the more frightening for that."

--Jane Miller, Times Literary Supplement

"The Stepdaughter is the perfect book for people who find Joan Didion too even-keeled, Renata Adler too fair-minded . . . In its own way, it's a perfect novel . . . Blackwood's best book . . . It deserves to be a cheeky summer hit."

--Gideon Leek, Los Angeles Review of Books

"A bracingly nasty book . . . Splendid, dark, often very funny."

--Megan Nolan, The Telegraph, Four-Star Review

"Caroline Blackwood inspired paintings by Lucian Freud and poetry by Robert Lowell. Her own work has been unjustly forgotten . . . But the preoccupation with her extravagant entanglements is misleading, for Blackwood was in fact a writer of rare distinction, the author of wit-drenched books about the wages of class, women's inhumanity to women, bitchiness, greed, abjection, family, monsters."

--Negar Azimi, The New Yorker

"Blackwood is 'an expert analyst of female fury, ' an outlook which is tempered by her deliciously dark sense of humour. She utilises black comedy as a means to engage with stories of the shocking difficulties faced by women and girls . . . Despite being a 'savagely original' voice and an irrepressible talent, Caroline Blackwood remains inexcusably neglected . . . Caroline Blackwood deserves to stand as a northern fiction author on par with her southern contemporary Edna O'Brien."

--Dawn Miranda Sherratt-Bado, Irish Times

"Blackwood's people expect little from the world and are granted as much. Spiritual anemia is a hallmark of contemporary novels, but these mostly lack Blackwood's élan, her breathless glee at human absurdities. Despite the bleakness of her vision, I find a kind of mangled hope in her obdurate, quixotic characters, in their commitment to the peculiar arrangements that allow them to live with the madness around them, in the baleful laughter behind it all. Life is tricky, trying, often unbearable. Also very funny."

--Janique Vigier, Bookforum

"One of the greatest, darkest writers who ever lived . . . Her books are concise, mordant essays on evil . . . Blackwood's magnificent works are like pure odes to odium, her prose cuttingly matter-of-fact . . . Blackwood's works delve deeply into complicated, ugly relationships between women, something that is especially fascinating when the author herself was defined throughout her lifetime by her marriages to high-profile men."

--Virginia Feito, CrimeReads

"Caroline Blackwood sits firmly alongside the greats like Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith. Her writing is smart, economical and as dark as night. She takes you deep into the foulest reaches of the human condition and leaves you breathless."

--Araminta Hall, author of Imperfect Women

"Caroline the pessimist made the world a happier place to be in because she could make mocking music of its terrors."

--Jonathan Raban

"Blackwood's macabre humor teases out the farcical aspects of human behavior at its most awkward and unmanageable, addressing outrageous situations with glacial detachment and overtones of Gothic dread. 'The worst that could happen, ' in Blackwood's fiction, is what is always happening, and from a certain perspective, always, horribly, hilarious."

--Gary Indiana

A "savage, controlled first novel . . . conveying her sense of entrapment by her brood of children."

--Brenda Maddox, The Washington Post

"Witty, observant, clever, an unusual entertainment--and something more besides."

--Robert Nye, The Guardian

Publisher: McNally Editions

Pub date: 2024-08-13

Length: 120 pages