My first book for this year’s Novellas in November is by an author I tried for the first time last year, when I read and enjoyed The Stepdaughter. I’d heard that Great Granny Webster, which was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize, is considered her best book, so I was looking forward to reading it.

Great Granny Webster draws on Blackwood’s own memories and experiences and feels very like a memoir; in fact, the poet Philip Larkin, one of the Booker Prize judges, apparently voted against her, saying that the book was “autobiography, not fiction” – which I think was a bit unfair as I’m sure you could say the same about a lot of novels.

The book begins in 1947 with our fourteen-year-old narrator, who is recovering from surgery, being sent to stay with Great Granny Webster so she can benefit from the sea air. However, although Great Granny Webster lives only minutes away from Brighton with its beach and pier, the narrator experiences very little of the sea air because Great Granny Webster disapproves of it. In fact, she disapproves of everything. Her days are spent sitting upright on a hard chair in a dimly-lit drawing room drinking only water and doing nothing – apart from when she accompanies the narrator for a drive along the seafront in a chauffeur-driven black Rolls Royce with the window open just enough to let in a tiny breath of air. As the narrator observes, “I don’t think that I have ever since met a human being who smiled more rarely, who found less in life to amuse her”.

This visit to Great Granny Webster leaves the narrator curious about other members of her family, so she speaks to her Aunt Lavinia in the hope of finding out more. Lavinia, a glamorous, frivolous woman who lives only for pleasure and amusement, couldn’t be more different from Great Granny Webster. Beneath her fun-loving exterior, though, there’s a darkness and an emptiness leading to several suicide attempts. The narrator also listens to the memories of Tommy Redcliffe, an old friend of her father’s who had visited the family home, Dunmartin Hall, a crumbling estate in Northern Ireland. Tommy tells her about her grandmother (Great Granny’s daughter), a woman suffering from mental health problems who believes her children have been stolen by fairies and replaced with changelings.

This is not a book with a lot of plot; it feels more like a collection of anecdotes than a cohesive story. What it does very effectively, though, is show us how the three generations of this dysfunctional family are linked, with misery, mental illness and destruction being passed down from one woman to the next. All three women are interesting to read about, but it’s the cold, austere Great Granny Webster who is the strongest presence in this dark and unsettling book.

Here are some other novellas I’ve read and reviewed since last year’s Novellas in November:

Suspicion by Seichō Matsumoto
Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison
West by Carys Davies
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Letter to My Judge by Georges Simenon
The Cat by Colette