Caroline Blackwood has been experiencing something of a revival lately. Her debut novel, The Stepdaughter, was reissued by McNally Editions in August. Virago has now republished her penultimate novel, The Fate of Mary Rose, with new editions of Great Granny Webster and Corrigan scheduled to follow in early 2026. No mention of Blackwood comes without reference to her staggering beauty or famous husbands – she was married to Lucian Freud, Israel Citkowitz and Robert Lowell – but perhaps these reissues will encourage readers to look beyond her biography. 

In The Fate of Mary Rose, she mines the thriller and murder mystery genres for sleights of hand and eerie, claustrophobic atmospheres, but she rejects their neatness. Unusually for Blackwood, the novel has a male narrator, Rowan Anderson. Anderson, an alcoholic historian who dislikes women, is a classic Blackwood creation – the sort of man she loved in life and who crops up often in her fiction – tall, dark, handsome, clever and wildly inconsiderate. Rowan’s wife, Cressida, lives in Kent and cares for their daughter, Mary Rose, with exaggerated devotion. Blackwood delights in laying out the bizarre excesses of this dynamic. Cressida sleeps in the same room as Mary Rose and constantly administers ineffectual lotions and potions. When a local child is found dead and mutilated, Cressida develops an all-consuming obsession with the case, forcing Mary Rose to recount the details of the child’s rape as though she is reciting a nursery rhyme. Wearing clothes dyed black in a large steel cauldron, mother and daughter hold a rain-soaked vigil after the funeral. (‘I think the Suttons will want me to be there,’ Cressida stubbornly tells Rowan, who thinks it preposterous for either his wife or his daughter to attend.)

Although the narrator’s central concern is not who committed the crime but whether Cressida is a fit guardian for Mary Rose, the novel also functions as a whodunnit, with Rowan as chief suspect. The late Gary Indiana compared Blackwood’s plotting technique to that of a matador: ‘the author waves a