For all that I found there

by Caroline Blackwood

For all that I found there, I might as well be where the Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea.Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood eldest child of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness. She married Lucien Freud, Isreal Citkowitz and Robert Lowell.The sentimental nostalgia of these lines has no part in Caroline Blackwood's view of her native Ulster. This collection brings together the work of a startlingly original writer who looks back on her childhood with the same sardonic gaze that she directs upon the wider world. Her book is divided into three parts -Fiction, Fact and Ulster - and contains both stories and reportage. Whether the subject be a burns hospital, a Women's Lib. meeting, a progressive school in Harlem, or simply the age-old conflict between the sexes, she writes with a kind of appalled wit which never fails to illuminate the realities.Caroline Blackwood was born and brought up in County Down, and has lived since in England and America. She is married to the poet Robert Lowell.

Genres: Fiction

143 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1973

About the author

was a writer, and the eldest child of The 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and the brewery heiress Maureen Guinness.

A well-known figure in the literary world through her journalism and her novels, Lady Caroline Blackwood was equally well known for her high-profile marriages, first to the artist Lucian Freud, then to the composer Israel Citkowitz and finally to the poet Robert Lowell, who described her as "a mermaid who dines upon the bones of her winded lovers". Her novels are known for their wit and intelligence, and one in particular is scathingly autobiographical in describing her unhappy childhood.

She was born into an Anglo-Irish aristocratic family from Ulster at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home. She was, she admitted, "scantily educated" at, among other schools, Rockport School (County Down) and Downham (Essex). After a finishing school in Oxford she was presented as a debutante in 1949 at a ball held at Londonderry House.