Blackwood's first job was with
Hulton Press as a secretary, but she was soon given small reporting jobs by
Claud Cockburn. In Paris she met
Picasso (and reportedly refused to wash for three days after he drew on her hands and nails). After marrying artist
Lucian Freud in 1953, she became a figure in London's bohemian circles, the
Gargoyle Club and
Colony Room replacing
Belgravia drawing rooms. She sat for several of Freud's portraits, including
Girl in Bed. She was impressed by the vision of Freud and painter
Francis Bacon, and her later fiction was influenced by their view of humanity. In the early 1960s, Blackwood began contributing to
Encounter,
London Magazine, and other periodicals on subjects such as
beatniks,
Ulster sectarianism,
feminist theatre and
New York free schools. According to
Christopher Isherwood, "she is only capable of thinking negatively. Confronted by a phenomenon, she asks herself: what is wrong with it?" During the mid-1960s, she had an affair with
Robert Silvers, the American founder and co-editor of
The New York Review of Books. Her third husband, American poet
Robert Lowell, was an influence on her talents as a novelist. He encouraged her to write her first book,
For All That I Found There (1973), the title of which is a line from the
Percy French song "The Mountains of Mourne". It includes a memoir of her daughter's treatment in a burns unit. Blackwood published her first novel
The Stepdaughter (1976) three years later, and it received much acclaim and won the
David Higham Prize for best first novel.
Great Granny Webster followed in 1977 and was partly derived from her own childhood. It depicts an old woman's destructive impact on her daughter and granddaughter. It was short-listed for the 1977
Booker Prize.
The Last of the Duchess was completed in 1980. A study of the relations between the
Duchess of Windsor and her lawyer,
Suzanne Blum, it could not be published until after Blum's death in 1995. Blackwood's third novel,
The Fate of Mary Rose (1981), describes the effect on a Kent village of the rape and torture of a ten-year-old girl named Maureen. It is narrated by a historian whose obsessions destroy his domestic life. After this, she completed a collection of five short stories,
Good Night Sweet Ladies (1983). Her final novel,
Corrigan, was published in 1984. Blackwood's later books were based on interviews and vignettes, including
On The Perimeter (1984), which focused her attentions on the
Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp at
RAF Greenham Common in
Berkshire, and
In The Pink (1987), which explores the hunting and the
hunt saboteur fraternities. ==Published works==