Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood

First edition, first printing.  x, 378pp, with monochrome portrait plate frontispiece and one full colour plate illustration.  Quarter bound in grey cloth over grey paper-covered boards. Deckled edges.  8vo.  Boards  gently bumped on upper leading corner, very slightly rubbed on remaining corners and spine tips.  Internally neat, clean, bright and tight.  In its original illustrated dust wrapper, not price clipped, lightly bumped on extreme edges and a little rounded around the upper leading corner.  Publisher’s slip giving credits for the colour plate illustration loosely laid in. 

Caroline Blackwood was born into the Guinness family in Northern Ireland in 1931.  Brought up in the ancestral home, Blackwood moved easily among the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, Soho bohemians of postwar England and the liberal intelligentsia of 1960s New York.  Intimate with some of the most celebrated artists and writers of the time, she was known as the muse to genius.  But her marriages to three brilliant men – artist Lucian Freud, the composer Israel Citkowitz and poet Robert Lowell – were as troubled as they were inspiring.