From Publishers Weekly
Lady Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996), with her wealth, fame, brilliance, eccentricity, dysfunction and illness, is an ideal subject for an absorbingly juicy (albeit tragic) biography. Perhaps best known for marrying painter Lucian Freud, then Aaron Copland's prize student Israel Citkowitz, then patrician poet Robert Lowell, the mysterious Blackwood, with her enormous, unflinching eyes, was "one of the great beauties of her day"; she was also a writer in her own right. Schoenberger (Girl on a White Porch), former director of the Academy of American Poets, never met Blackwood (the day of their proposed meeting, Blackwood was hospitalized and died soon thereafter). The author traces this troubled, fascinating life from a childhood on a grand family estate in Northern Ireland, through her marriages to brilliant yet tortured and unstable men, and then through widowhood, when Blackwood inhabited a former funeral home in Sag Harbor, on New York's Long Island, reputedly haunted still by her dark presence. Blackwood inspired her husbands' brilliant works such as Freud's photograph Girl in Bed (it was clutched by Lowell when he died of a heart attack) and Lowell's The Dolphin, dedicated to Caroline. But Schoenberger calls her "both a muse and an anti-muse," for she also undermined their creativity with her alcoholism and cruel wit, provoking their worst qualities, like Freud's gambling and womanizing, Citkowitz's passivity and Lowell's bipolar illness and abusiveness. Alternately vibrant and pathetic, Blackwood alienated and insulted everyone around her. Schoenberger targets the general reader over the scholar particularly with her exploration of Blackwood's "curse" but those interested in literary biography, particularly in the lives of artists and the sources of their creativity, will find relevant material here. Agents, Joy Harris and Leslie Daniels. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (July 3)Forecast: Though already chosen for the Wall Street Journal's summer reading list, with first serial rights sold to Vogue, this myth-making bio will have to show unexpected reach to appeal to a mass of readers. The author will do some regional publicity in New York and Washington, D.C.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Lady Caroline Blackwood, who died in 1996, is best known in the United States for her turbulent marriage to poet Robert Lowell (the last of her three husbands). Born into the Anglo-Irish nobility in 1931, she was an heiress to the Guinness fortune and one of the most glamorous socialites of her day. Brilliant but moody, she first married the painter Lucian Freud, who commemorated her eerie beauty in several famous paintings. Although she had written sporadically throughout her life, it was not until after Lowell's death in 1977 that she began to concentrate on her haunting, often autobiographical fiction and nonfiction (e.g., Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the Booker). Blackwood died before she and Schoenberger (creative writing, Coll. of William & Mary; Girl on a White Porch) could agree on this biography. The subsequent destruction of her papers, plus the refusal of Blackwood's children and family to contribute, has made this a rather thin study of a bewildering woman whose character is not entirely explained by hereditary eccentricity, alcoholism, and an unhappy life. For general and specialized collections. (Illustrations not seen.) Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Perhaps some day Caroline Blackwood will have dwindled into a mere footnote to the poetry of Robert Lowell. But with this vivid biography, Schoenberger has forestalled academic oblivion for at least another decade. It is no literary abstraction but a fiery and willful woman who lives in this searing chronicle of taboos defied, lives scarred, and great poetry achieved. From the time she agreed as a mere girl to strip for prepubescent boys attending her private prep school, Blackwood played a perilous game, recklessly risking her own ruin and that of those who loved (or lusted after) her, all for the sake of raw and intense experience. Schoenberger plumbs the turbid depths of those experiences as recorded in Blackwood's caustic satire and dark verse. But it is during her seven-year marriage to Lowell (which Blackwood acknowledged as her "main marriage") that her unruly passions coalesced into their clearest meanings. Probing beneath some of the most haunting lines of Lowell's The Dolphin and Day by Day, Schoenberger reveals Blackwood's irresistible, yet lacerating, influence. Lowell's many admirers--who typically know he died clutching a portrait of Caroline--will themselves take a firm grip on this nuanced biography of the woman who so tormented and inspired him. Bryce Christensen
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New York Times Book Review
"Dangerous Muse is not so much a literary biography as a fable for our own times-dramatic, chilling and suggestive."
Review
"Dangerous Muse is a dangerous book seductive, surprising, utterly beguiling. I don't know when a biography has held me captive like this unable and unwilling to escape from Blackwood, her husbands, her silences, her beauty and recklessness. Schoenberger writes like an angel, researches like a demon, paints portraits like a Rembrandt. A stunning performance in every way."
--David Laskin, author of Partisans
Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Dangerous Muse is the first biography of Lady Caroline Blackwood. Drawing upon numerous interviews and unpublished letters from Blackwood's mother, Maureen Dufferin, and friends and family, including Andrew Harvey, Jonathan Raban, John Richardson, and Caroline's sister Perdita Blackwood, Nancy Schoenberger captures one of the most original and provocative figures in contemporary letters of the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.
FROM THE CRITICS
Hilary Spurling - New York Times Book Review
Dangerous Muse is not so much a literary biography as a fable for our own times -- dramatic, chilling and suggestive -- in the same way as Grimm's fairy tales (or for that matter Freud's case histories) were for theirs.
Book Magazine
Born into title and wealth, Anglo-Irish aristocrat Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) made use of both assets. Raised on her family's fortune, Blackwood grew up on a rambling country estate ("5,400 acres then, dwindled from its original 18,000"), played debutante in 1949 and was introduced to her first husband, painter Lucian Freud, by Ann Fleming (wife to James Bond creator Ian). In the decadent times that followed, Caroline and Lucien became the toast of 1950s London. For Blackwood, wild times, two more husbands and at least one capricious lover followed. Schoenberger suggests that the beautiful Blackwood was some kind of dark muse (dark, because her relationships were always troubled) to her three artist husbands. The book, which relies on excerpts from Blackwood's writings and a collection of quotes from those who knew her, makes for a fascinating read, yet it never quite gets beyond the sad portrait of a desperate woman with too much time on her hands. —Daneet Steffens (Excerpted Review)
Library Journal
Lady Caroline Blackwood, who died in 1996, is best known in the United States for her turbulent marriage to poet Robert Lowell (the last of her three husbands). Born into the Anglo-Irish nobility in 1931, she was an heiress to the Guinness fortune and one of the most glamorous socialites of her day. Brilliant but moody, she first married the painter Lucian Freud, who commemorated her eerie beauty in several famous paintings. Although she had written sporadically throughout her life, it was not until after Lowell's death in 1977 that she began to concentrate on her haunting, often autobiographical fiction and nonfiction (e.g., Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the Booker). Blackwood died before she and Schoenberger (creative writing, Coll. of William & Mary; Girl on a White Porch) could agree on this biography. The subsequent destruction of her papers, plus the refusal of Blackwood's children and family to contribute, has made this a rather thin study of a bewildering woman whose character is not entirely explained by hereditary eccentricity, alcoholism, and an unhappy life. For general and specialized collections. (Illustrations not seen.) Shelley Cox, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
The unhappy life of a jet-setting socialite and intellectual, sympathetically retold. Born in 1931 into the wealthy, influential Guinness family in Northern Ireland, Caroline Blackwood was renowned for both her beauty and her intelligence. A familiar figure among the smart sets of London, Paris, and New York, she served as confidante and muse to the likes of Cyril Connolly, Robert Silvers, Roger Bacon, Ned Rorem, and Jonathan Raban—and married (in succession) painter Lucian Freud, composer Israel Citkowitz, and poet Robert Lowell. Although Blackwood's life was ready grist for gossip columnists, Schoenberger (Long Like a River, 1998, etc.) treats her subject seriously, noting that for all its social and arty swirl, Blackwood's life came to center on her work, a body of novels and journalism that Schoenberger compares favorably to the work of such contemporaries as John McPhee and Tom Wolfe. And while Blackwood enjoyed the privileges of an aristocratic birth, the fates frowned on her nevertheless, and from very early her life was set on a sorrowful course. Her father was killed in Burma during WWII, her mother abandoned her to nannies and boarding schools, her husbands subjected her to various cruelties, infidelities, and forms of madness, one of her children died young, and reviewers never quite recognized her for the clearly talented (if minor) writer that she was. This bad luck, Schoenberger hazards, contributed to Blackwood's uncertainty over whether the world "was a godless place or one ruled by a malicious intelligence." The author does not shy away, however, from an important aspect of the story—namely, that many of Blackwood's tragedies came from her own seeminglyungovernable self-destructive tendencies (manifested most clearly in lifelong alcoholism and bouts of depression). A capable account, both critical and admiring, that may win Blackwood new readers.
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