SOURCE: "Lady Caroline Blackwood, Wry Novelist, Is Dead at 64," in The New York Times, February 15, 1996, p. B16.

In the obituary below, Kimmelman provides an overview of Blackwood's life and career.

Lady Caroline Blackwood, a writer of wry, macabre novels and essays, and a beguiling Anglo-Irish aristocrat who married the painter Lucian Freud and the poet Robert Lowell, died yesterday in the Mayfair Hotel in Manhattan, where she stayed the last few weeks while she was ill. She was 64.

The cause was cancer, said her daughter Ivana Lowell.

She published nine books and was best known and much admired in Britain. Among her works was The Stepdaughter, a short epistolary novel about an abusive woman abandoned by her husband and left with his hideous daughter. Another novel, The Fate of Mary Rose, was about an increasingly deranged mother's fatal obsession with her daughter's safety.

Her most recent book, The...