Forgotten novelist and member of the Guinness dynasty Caroline Blackwood is ripe for rediscovery

“She was dead even before I became aware of her existence,” begins Caroline Blackwood’s macabre, disturbing, yet richly intricate short novel, peopled with a disagreeable cast of characters. Even the innocent child in the title, Mary Rose, is difficult to like. This strikingly original novel, reissued by Virago, tells of Cressida, a chilly woman trapped by her attempt to create the perfect upbringing for her daughter in a picture-postcard Kent village.

But she’s not the only prisoner. Her daughter, too, is held captive — quite literally — by the mother’s obsessive behaviour..