Corrigan

Caroline Blackwood

Apr. 2012 · New York Review of Books

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Corrigan is at once a mordant comedy of manners and a very modern morality play. Since her husband’s death, the increasingly frail Mrs. Blunt has had only her trips to his grave to look forward to. Her raucous housekeeper’s conversation, and cooking, are best forgotten. Nadine, her daughter, is an infrequent, uneasy visitor. Then one day a charming, wheelchair-bound Irishman shows up at Mrs. Blunt’s door in search of charitable contributions. Corrigan is an arch manipulator, Mrs. Blunt is his mark, and before long we realize that they are made for each other. As the two grow ever more entrenched, Nadine fears for her mother’s safety (or is it for her own inheritance?).

With Corrigan Caroline Blackwood takes a long, hard look at our dearly beloved notions of saints and sinners, victims and villains, patrimony and present pleasure, and winks.

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Caroline Blackwood (1931-1996) was born into a rich Anglo-Irish aristocratic family. She rebelled against her background at an early age and led a hectic and bohemian life, which included marriages to the painter Lucian Freud, the pianist and composer Israel Citkowitz, and the poet Robert Lowell. In the 1970s Blackwood began to write. Among her books are several novels, including Great Granny Webster and Corrigan (both available as NYRB Classics); On the Perimeter, an account of the women’s anti-nuclear protest at Greenham Common; and The Last of the Duchess, about the old age of the Duchess of Windsor.

Andrew Solomon is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Artforum, and The New York Times Magazine, and the author of The Irony Tower: Soviet Artists in a Time of Glasnost; the novel A Stone Boat; and The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, for which he received the National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination. He lives in New York City and London.