When Lady Caroline Blackwood walked through the graveyard that housed her ancestors, she felt tortured by fate. Death came for members of the Guinness family too frequently and too early. The sports cars of relatives had rammed into walls or swerved into oncoming traffic; an aunt had jumped off an aqueduct in Italy. Then there were the overdoses, the sudden illnesses, even an assassination. Blame was placed on a family curse: Perhaps the maintenance of such wealth and power—from all the beer barons, bankers, and politicians the family had produced—was only possible through the occasional blood sacrifice? Though Blackwood would write about royal intrigue, dusty estates, and decrepit countesses terrorizing anyone nearby, the curse she was most interested in was not exclusive to the privileged. It was one we all carry, to which no person is immune: having a mother.

Two recent reissues of Blackwood’s work display the breadth of her cursed maternal relations. The Stepdaughter (1976), her debut novel, gave us the first of Blackwood’s many monstrous mothers. Four years before the book’s original publication, Blackwood had married Robert Lowell, who at the time was stitching together stray bits of verse and the anguished letters of his ex-wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, for his poetry collection The Dolphin (1973). The Stepdaughter would prove a cruel, epistolary work of a different kind.

The novel is the story of J, an amateur painter holed up in her gorgeous, giant New York apartment—the only worthwhile asset left over from her failed marriage. J’s lawyer husband, Arnold, has run off with a young Frenchwoman and has neglected to take along Renata, his frumpy 13-year-old daughter. Unspoken but implied is that Arnold will let J keep the apartment so long as their 4-year-old daughter Sally Ann and, more crucially, Renata are cared for—though the childcare duties are largely palmed off on another Frenchwoman, a young au pair named Monique. The Stepdaughter is made up of J’s tirades, shoved into the shape of raging letters to no one, that she writes in her head: “Dearest… Today is a Sunday. Sundays are always my worst days. Renata has no school.” The style is characteristic Blackwood: pungent and compact, with sentences that land like an axe.

At first, J’s imagined letters are nominally aimed at Monique. J is horrified by her youth, her hopes, her tanned, slender arms and quaint cooking. But in reality, J rarely addresses Monique at all, apart from the odd command, leaving the au pair to converse with her toddler: “When she tries to communicate with Sally Ann, it’s with the desperation of some prisoner in an ancient dungeon who tries to save his sanity by talking to the rats.” We learn that J has commenced her internal letter-writing to counter Monique’s compulsive scribbling of sad missives (“la femme ici est abominable”) to her friends back home, which J has discovered by reading over her shoulder.

But Monique is a minor diversion from J’s main source of disgust, Renata, and the letters are merely a forum for her to soliloquize about the oppressions that have befallen her. Her stepdaughter’s existence, for one, produces a laundry list of offenses: Renata uses an obscene amount of toilet paper, routinely clogging up the bowl. Renata is frightened of kettles, insects, and cats. Renata is ugly and overweight, lacking style. Renata is stupid and missing something elemental, “a lobotomised misfit.” Renata’s sole joy is pathetic: cooking packaged cake mixes, gazing in awe at the resulting rock-hard mounds, seemingly thinking of herself as some sort of artisanal baker. It is for this particular habit that J’s (and Blackwood’s) language is at its most ruthless: “Recently she has been baking far more than her usual quota of instant cakes. Now, when she gobbles them down, it’s as if she is hoping that in some camel-like way her body will be able to store them up and enable her to survive the desert future she fears must lie ahead.” Naturally, J looks to newspaper images of bomb craters and wounded children for momentary relief.

To be perversely thrilled by the brutality lobbed at an undesired teenager is one thing, but to be drawn to side with the teenager’s oppressor is something else entirely. The sly genius of The Stepdaughter is how we’re reeled in to sympathize with J’s lunatic logic and victim complex. Reading the novel has the same effect of being sucked into a conversation with a charming egomaniac. Only later, away from the pull of their vortex, do you realize the depths of their single-mindedness and savagery—that their complaints don’t warrant their theatrics; that it wasn’t exactly a conversation, but rather a self-pitying, raving spiel.

Later in the novel, when Renata disappears after revealing that she isn’t really Arnold’s biological daughter, J is forced to turn back to herself. Without Renata, the story that J has told about her life—all the betrayal and thwarted ambition—loses its solid shape. Unlike the impotence that marks many of Blackwood’s characters, J is spurred to retrieve Renata, the loss of burdensome family ties finally freeing up the space for sympathy and care.

Blackwood likes the hard, thick lines of caricature: the evil grandmama, the merciless hospital matron, the self-obsessed socialite lacquered in makeup, the weaselly male cuck. But inside those inky borders, she brings to bear horrid realities. In The Stepdaughter, it’s the fortifications we build out of deflection and preoccupation, funneling all our torments into a single, easy source; how we perpetuate the pain of being unloved by passing it on to others. Blackwood’s fiction is a playground for human ugliness in which she gets to be the bully, manipulative and cunning, pulling down the pants of her characters to expose their shameful natures.

All of Blackwood’s novels are domestic, zeroing in on the prisons we build for ourselves, at home and in marriage. “In the center—one could say the vacant center—of the reverse magnetic field that Blackwood’s men and women create between them is an abstraction called ‘the family,’” noted the writer Gary Indiana. Guilt, pointless decorum, and a good deal of ambivalence are the glue that holds these miserable arrangements together. The animosity is not only shared between wife and husband but travels down the familial line. Repeated across Blackwood’s stories is the anguish felt by parents who must contend with their boring, dopey children. But above all else it was the mother—who is supposed to love and care, but can only ever wound—who remained her favorite villain.

The gothic flavor of Blackwood’s fiction stemmed from childhood, where great privilege curdled with deprivation. She was born in 1931, to parents of titled gentry: Maureen Constance Guinness and Basil Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, the marchioness and marquess, respectively, of Dufferin and Ava. Blackwood was 13 when her father died, blown up by a Japanese mortar shell at the tail end of World War II. Her mother stuck around but was barely there, always fleeing the countryside to socialize in London. Blackwood never got over her mother’s contempt and indifference. The family lived in a sprawling, rotting estate in Ulster called Clandenboye, where Blackwood and her sibling were cared for by a succession of despotic nannies, with the worst of them fond of withholding food and starving her charges. Blackwood’s youth coincided with wartime in Northern Ireland, a preoccupation of her early stories, where the boredom was punctuated by toothless horse instructors, violent school teachers, and a mad grandmother steadfast in her belief in fairies. After the war, when Blackwood came of age, she was quickly placed on the assembly line for marriageable aristocrats: finishing school, debutante balls.

Much of her life seemed to move between total renunciation of this upper-crust upbringing and grand entitlement (she always insisted upon the “Lady” honorific). She managed to weasel her way out through marriage, where she aligned herself with those seen by her family as unsuitable, whose lives and art she admired. Blackwood met her first husband, Lucien Freud, in 1949, at a socialite’s party in London—he was standing next to Francis Bacon, who was busy booing Princess Margaret for an excruciating performance of Cole Porter songs. Blackwood was the subject of Freud’s early expressionist portraits, with delicate strands of gold hair and eyes like fishbowls; the relationship ended less tenderly. In its aftermath, Blackwood went to Rome, where she had an affair with the film producer Ivan Moffat and then in the mid-1950s followed him to Hollywood. She thought she might try her luck at acting. It was a bust, but LSD psychotherapy, encouraged by Cary Grant, appears to have activated her writing abilities.