‘The Stepdaughter’ by Caroline Blackwood        (1976) – 94 pages                #NOVNOV24

I have never read so hostile or negative a description of a child character in a novel as that which J uses in ‘The Stepdaughter’ to describe her 15 year old stepdaughter Renata.

“It is difficult to describe how she manages to be so disturbing, this Humpty Dumpty of a girl. She gives one the feeling that somewhere in the past she took such a great fall that everything healthy in her personality was badly smashed.”

“The thing that Renata lacked so painfully was the very smallest grain of either physical or personal charm.”

J even describes how Renata uses so much toilet paper that the toilet overflows and the stuff gets on the floor and she has to call the plumber.

“Renata’s problems seemed so insoluble that one starts to feel such a fierce impatience with her that although I have to admit it one often has a longing to try to damage her even more.”

Perhaps it is the way she has been burdened with this stepdaughter that causes J to be so hostile toward her. Her husband Arnold went off to Paris leaving behind his daughter Renata from a previous marriage. Now Arnold has sent a letter from Paris saying that he wants to leave J. He now has a girlfriend. So J is stuck with Renata.

“If Arnold imagines he can start a new and beautiful life with his new and beautiful French girl, I can think of nothing more guaranteed to soil and smash his idyll than the arrival of this ungainly and unhappy girl who has survived the debris of her father’s two former marriages.”

I won’t write anymore about the plot of ‘The Stepdaughter’. I found this epistolary novella to be very well written and quite moving. What I do want to write about is the backstory of this author, Caroline Blackwood which somehow explains this novella.

Caroline Blackwood was born into the Guinness family, owners of the Guinness Brewery, so she was fabulously rich from the beginning. As a young woman, Caroline was known as a somewhat wild socialite who hung around with that other wild socialite, Princess Margaret, younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II. Later Caroline was married to three famous husbands, the bohemian artist Lucian Freud and the pianist/composer Israel Citkowitz and the famous American poet Robert Lowell. It was during this last marriage to Lowell, that Blackwood took up writing fiction.

The poet Robert Lowell had severe manic depressive episodes for which he often had to be hospitalized or institutionalized. His previous wife Elizabeth Hardwick figured it must have been during one of these manic episodes that Lowell took up with Caroline. Ultimately Lowell did divorce Hardwick and married Blackwood. However Blackwood could not deal with his mental problems, and Lowell died of a heart attack returning to the home of Hardwick.

On her deathbed, Caroline Blackwood confessed that one of her children she had while married to her second husband Citkowitz was not his child. After you read ‘The Stepdaughter’, you will understand that when Caroline Blackwood wrote this novella ‘The Stepdaughter’, this must have been on her conscience.

“Mother felt that, as it was, women, had to do all the work for children – Arnold had no right to make a big fuss about whether her child was his or not.”

Grade:    A         #NOVNOV24