Oh my goodness. In a quiet way, this is one of the most chilling and disturbing books I’ve ever read. I understand it was originally published some thirty odd years ago; it remains freshly and relevant. It’s a dark take of an obsessed and deeply unpleasant man, Rowan. As a reader, we are able to take a peek at life and the world as he sees it. He’s an egotist with thinly veiled contempt for most things, particularly women. Poor Mary Rose. It’s a difficult title to describe without reveal and it’s also an open ended tale which lingers. What’s particularly chilling is that the undercurrent of hatred and polarised view of women is possibly not exceptional. Without much effort, I can think of parallels and it’s quite frightening. Dark and compelling.

Caroline Blackwood's "The Fate of Mary Rose" is a disturbing look at the underlying violence in a family's life. While family might be an odd term for the relationship the narrator has with his family, they still create a makeshift family unit. Within this family unit, there are moments of shocking violence and cruelty. Blackwood tells the story through the eyes of the husband, Rowan. Rowan is certainly an unreliable narrator, and it's difficult to believe anything he says or does throughout the novel. He loathes his wife, daughter, and his mistress. Every woman is against him, and he sees them as the biggest nuisances in his life. Even by his own admission, he is a heavy drinker who's often so drunk that he has no memory of where he spent the night before.

Into this dynamic, the narrator (named Rowan) learns that a young child has been raped and murdered in the village. The rape and murder exacerbates the tension between Rowan and Cressida as Rowan has no memory of the night the girl went missing and Cressida begins to suspect her husband is a deeply disturbing man. Since we can never trust Rowan's narration, we're unsure and unsettled by his depiction of events. Is he lying to the reader out of guilt, or is he just not a very likeable man? Blackwood's talent leaves many of the events and answers up for interpretation.

The result is a creepy novel that has us look at women's anger and the mediocre man who judges and mistreats them. In a time when a man who admitted to sexually assaulting woman has been reelected as President of the U.S., it's impossible not to see the parallels in this book. This is what makes the novel difficult at the beginning. Rowan is such an unpleasant man that it was a bit difficult to get through all of his egotistical ramblings. I was hoping someone would throttle him. However, Blackwood expands the canvas to tell the story of the women around him, and this mitigates how insufferable he comes off from the onset.

Women's Prize longlisted author Camilla Grudova offers an introduction to the reissue of this stark and unyielding novel.

I've not read any of Caroline Blackwoods books before and was pleased to find a new author
Oh my goodness it was dark with two deeply flawed main characters and an ambiguous ending. Loved it!
Thank you to netgalley and Little, Brown books for an advance copy of this book

This book was previously published in the 80s but, to be honest, it actually didn't feel as dated as I thought it would. Obviously it is definitely of its day wrt values and male behaviour! I did try and find out why the re-publication but I guess some books just deserve a new audience and I am glad this one found me.
We start with a rather strange household. Rowan lives and works in London but his family - wife Cressida and daughter Mary Rose - live in a cottage in the country. Rowan visits them occasionally but doesn't really appear to enjoy his visits. Cressida tolerates him but you can see she is extremely close to Mary Rose and doesn't really enjoy his interference, but she is ever the dutiful wife. Back in London, his mistress is trying to dissuade him from going to see them, wanting him to divorce. He is reluctant.
It is during a visit to the country that Rowan and Cressida learn that a six year old village girl, Maureen, has gone missing from the local council estate. Cressida becomes fixated on this, especially when the worst is announced and starts to really fear for Mary Rose. Obsessively so. Which, eventually makes Rowan act...
Rowan is a cad. He's a misogynist but then he is of his time and place in society. He does however respect what he classes as intelligent women, especially the one of which he is writing about. Cressida is, well, dangerous. But whether this is of her doing or a byproduct of how she is treated, is debatable. They shouldn't be together but that's what you did back in the day.
It's unsettling, often upsetting. Cressida degenerates impressively during the book, especially with her obsession over the safety of Mary Rose, and the fate of Maureen. Rowan conversely sees Mary Rose as the tether that binds him to Cressida.
It's bleak, it's horrific, it's nasty, but it's a cracking read and has introduced me to another author whose back catalogue I will definitely have to check out.
My thanks go to the Publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book.

An odd but compelling tale told in such a way that I felt i was peeping through a gap in the curtains and catching a lot but not all of what was happening in the lives of this strange group.. Not a character in it I could like but my heart ached for Mary Rose.
Not a neat ending but then I didn’t expect there would be when I was only peeping in after all …

When I got approved for the new edition of this classic novel originally published 1981 I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into. "Simmering with female rage and repressed violence" what's not to like about that? Sometimes it is only the cover and a part of the resumé that gets you, you know. This was surprisingly creepy. Rowan is visiting his wife and daughter in a small town, thinking about divorcing her and being alienated by his kid. While there, another child goes missing and the mother cannot get over this. The more she dives in the paranoia of their daughter being next, the more he wants to leave them but stays out of feeling this being his duty. I was completely weirded out by more than half of this book. In memories the reader follows how they met, got married, etc and boy was I intrigued to keep on reading. Rowan does not care for any person in his life. Is everyone just overreacting like he thinks? It is a short novel but it packs a punch and matched my spooky reading list perfectly.

This was a disturbing, unsettling but really enjoyable read. I had never read anything by Caroline Blackwood prior to this novel and was pleasantly surprised by this dark, twisting work. It is a subtle but powerful psychological portrait of a mother struggling alone in the countryside and slowly losing her grasp on reality, as well as her incredibly self absorbed husband who narrates the story. This is a perfect read for the autumn and winter months, mixing characteristics of crime and psychological thriller to propel you through this exciting read.

As a long-standing Caroline Blackwood admirer I was really excited to see this being republished. It's a dark, provocative 1980s novel featuring a narcissistic husband – one of the most spectacularly heinous unreliable narrators ever encountered – and a wife who is a pressure-cooker of rage and maternal anxiety. It is super dark and very disquieting but a brilliant read.

Historian Rowan Anderson is a craven, self-centred, man with no discernible affinity for the women is his life. He lives apart from his strange, inert, wife Cressida and their frail, pallid, daughter Mary Rose.

For appearance’s sake he visits them in their country cottage every few weeks, where an icy formality reigns, and Mary Rose regards him with a mute apathy.

When a local child is raped and murdered Cressida’s oddness evolves into an obsessive mania of fear and wrath. She’s despairingly exalted by this opportunity to demonstrate the danger of the world, and the men who fill it, to her daughter.

As Cressida’s behaviours become more erratic, the congenitally unwilling Rowan is put under pressure to actually DO something about it. As what he liked best about his family was that he didn’t really need to involve himself with it, he initially finds this beyond his capabilities and interest, a position which quickly becomes untenable.

Like John Fowles’ The Collector the book puts us inside the head of a truly appalling human being, a man who can only find interest in his own purposes. Everyone else is a peg upon which to hang bits of his life.

Rowan has zero empathy, but intellectually can recognise remarkable women. The book he is trying to write about Hertha Ayrton (look her up, she rocks) and her incredible achievements is failing because he can document facts, but he can’t imbue his text with any sense of “the woman”. I thought this was a great character touch.

Cressida is monstrous in an entirely captivating way. We can’t look away, and we long to know what happened to her to make her this way. We know what makes Rowan such a shit: privilege.

The book is a bleak farce, reflecting the frictions between the classes, the sexes, and the rural and the urban. It has the traditional structure - a character trying to keep plates spinning in the face of endless disturbance and disruption, reaching fever pitch - but there are few laughs here. There is wit, but the horror is intense, delivered with fast jabbing gut-punches.

Extraordinary.

An unsettling unique story if a woman who has a baby with a man who doesn't know her. She becomes obsessed of safeguard her child, as a young girl is murdered in their village, significant impact on her mental health wellbeing, to the level.if locking her daughter in their cottage.

Didn't know this was a previous published, is so spooky & reads like a Shirley Jackson story. Unsure if 'liked' it, as was disturbed, but kept me to reading to the end.

A welcome reissue of Caroline Blackwood’s nightmarish novel which falls somewhere between crime and psychological horror. Although this lacks the wit and verve of the earlier Great Granny Webster, its unpredictable plot coupled with Blackwood’s trademark perversity makes for an addictive read. It’s narrated by historian Rowan, a self-centred man unable or unwilling to emotionally commit to the women in his life, including his small daughter. Rowan lives and works in London where he’s engaged in a turbulent affair with glamorous model Gloria. Rowan’s wife, Cressida, and child, Mary Rose, inhabit a countryside cottage which he visits as infrequently as possible; treating mother and daughter with an unfathomable disdain – for reasons later revealed. However, Cressida appears devoted to frail Mary Rose, and remarkably unconcerned by Rowan’s lack of involvement in their everyday lives. But then the sudden disappearance of six-year-old, local girl Maureen Sutton - the same age as Mary Rose - overturns Rowan’s ordered existence in ways he could never have imagined.

Biographers have linked Blackwood’s narrative to the recent loss of her own daughter Natalya. Not implausibly, it’s perfectly possible to trace a connection between Blackwood’s guilt about failings as a mother and perspectives on motherhood in the novel. But what fascinated me was Blackwood’s underlying commentary on English society, and on the impact of media representations of violent crime involving children. Blackwood’s story unfolds in the late 1970s in Beckham, a fictional village in Kent, reminiscent of those outwardly-idyllic spaces associated with Christie’s Miss Marple. Beckham with its bijou houses and manicured village green is under threat, a newly-built council estate looms over its previously unspoiled landscapes. A development that concretises economic upheavals and class conflicts of the time. The fact that Maureen Sutton hails from the estate confirms the suspicions of Beckham’s prosperous, middle-class residents: only a feckless, working-class mother would expose her child to unknown dangers; and only an estate of this kind could harbour a potentially deranged killer.

Blackwood’s depiction of the aftermath of Maureen Sutton’s death mirrors public reactions to real-life crime cases from the infamous Moors murders to the Babes in the Woods killings. The hunt for Maureen, and then for her killer, is widely televised, sparking a sinister, increasingly-frenzied response. Maureen’s photogenic appearance increases her currency, conjuring images of innocence corrupted by evil, fostering a culture of fear centred on so-called ‘stranger danger’ – even though then, as now, children were far more at risk in their own homes. The destructive potential of such cultural anxieties is reflected in Cressida’s ghoulish obsession with the grisly details of Maureen’s case; and subsequent callous treatment of Mary Rose which she justifies as a necessary precaution.

The Fate of Mary Rose was supposedly Caroline Blackwood’s favourite of all her books, the perfect expression of her relentlessly bleak worldview. It’s admirably complex but it can also be disturbingly contradictory and uncomfortable. Much of my discomfort’s tied to Cressida’s characterisation. Physically Cressida closely resembles Blackwood and/or Blackwood’s mother – both were famous society beauties. But she could also pass for one of Hitchcock’s ‘frigid’ blondes, rushed revelations about her past even overlap with Hitchcock’s Marnie. And as with Hitchcock’s blondes, there’s more than a whiff of misogyny in Cressida’s portrayal as suffocating, monstrous mother. Although, to be fair, monstrous women, and not-so-great men, are commonplace in Blackwood’s fiction. Fans of crime fiction may also find the lack of conventional closure frustrating. Flawed but thought-provoking and incredibly distinctive – think Barbara Comyns meets Shirley Jackson meets Celia Fremlin. This new Virago edition comes with an introduction from author Camilla Grudova who's a die-hard Blackwood fan.

This is a reissue of a 1981 novel. The book is narrated by Rowan, a pompous and narcissistic man who lives in London with his mistress, making sporadic visits to his wife and daughter in Kent and looks down on his fragile daughter. He scorns his wife for her anxiety and her domesticity and feels disdain for his mistress for her drama and what he perceives as vacuousness.

He's a frustrating and deeply irritating unreliable narrator in this dark and unsettling drama that's part parody and part horror. The themes of obsession with true crime (a local girl is killed) are relevant today and it's a timely reissue. It's a short novel but worth reading.

Definite shades of Shirley Jackson.

I think if you’ve got a surname like Blackwood, you’ve got to write things that are just a bit horrifying.

Initially published in 1981, THE FATE OF MARY ROSE concerns the disappearance of young Maureen Sutton from a sleepy village in Kent, and historian Rowan Anderson, dragged into the hysteria against his will by his eccentric wife Cressida. Soon fixated on the news, Cressida’s unsettling demeanour turns sinister as she sets about protecting their sickly daughter, Mary Rose, from the same fate - and perhaps even from her husband.

When you’re putting together a reprint list for publication, an important aspect to consider is why you’ve chosen to reprint the text in question within today’s market: when we designate a book to be a classic, we often do it not only due to the literary value we deem it to have, but due to the cultural value. In short, when we decide a book’s a classic, it’s got to mean something to us today in order to justify it’s continuing presence on shelves. In this regard, THE FATE OF MARY ROSE feels like not only a judicious, but an obvious choice for republication. If you boil the plot down to its very basic elements, it concerns how we engage with crime and its reporting, how boundaries are violated within the intimate nature of news as we receive it, and the paranoia which can be sustained through an unhealthy obsession with dark news; while not in the age of social media, where armchair detectives have more power than ever, THE FATE OF MARY ROSE demonstrates precisely how these are constant features of engagement with crime, and how this paranoid can weasel into environments where most consider themselves safe.

In terms of protagonist, Blackwood does a great job of making Rowan a morally grey unreliable narrator: which is to say that she does a really effective job of making him deeply, deeply irritating. From the very first page, he’s overwhelmingly narcissistic, not only in his skewed priorities, but in how he treats the people around him. His alimony provisions are phrased entirely through how inconvenient they are to him, his disgust towards Cressida is visible from the outset, his affair with the glamourous Gloria is one-sided and selfish, and he is more than happy to place his timid secretary in danger for his own personal comfort. Quite simply, this guy stinks. A common thread throughout, and often demonstrated by Rowan, also concerns a common dominating factor of how patriarchy asserts itself: by similarly asserting that femininity, in all its expressions, is somehow wrong and deviant. Alongside his mocking of Cressida’s performances of domesticity at the outset, he shows abject contempt for the articles Gloria writes (deemed vapid in comparison to his own historical research), and while the women of the village grow increasingly terrified at the prospect of a perverted murderer lurking in plain sight, Rowan implies that this concern towards the prospect of sexual violence is somehow hysterical. Interestingly, there are very few male characters within the novel, and those who do exist are often unspeaking or reduced to named references in dialogue. This in turn gives the impression of a reverse Bechdel Test at work (for those unfamiliar, the Bechdel Test is a hypothetical piece of light media criticism established by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, in which a piece of media passes the test by containing two named female characters who have a conversation about something other than a man): women are the lifeblood of this novel, and so are depictions of female anxieties in the face of male violence.

Consequently, the presence of this unreliable narrator again complicates the plot, but not merely due to his opinions: in the context of the novel, this unreliability extends to his alibis. We establish early on that, in his self-pitying contempt for everyone around him (‘contempt’ is a very good summary for Rowan’s character), Rowan is a drunk who spends much of his time at the local pub in order to avoid spending time with Cressida and Mary Rose, and as such, when Maureen Sutton does go missing, even Rowan himself does not know where he was at the time of the murder: was he in the pub, or doing something entirely different? As the pace continues to meander into foreboding territory - while the book clocks in at scarcely over 200 pages, the slow pacing lets us linger in the seething sense of ominousness we find ourselves in - I found that, by the time of the conclusion, it is possible to know almost less about the characters than I did at the beginning.

THE FATE OF MARY ROSE is a distinctly British story, and nowhere says it more that in the undertones of class which run beneath it like a skeleton. There is a reason why so many famous murder mysteries utilise the British village as their setting, and in many cases it’s because of the expectations people have of these villages. In many cases, especially in the 70’s-80’s in which we can assume the novel is set, these villages have increasingly become communities of the middle-class, especially in the South and with the benefit of proximity to London. Maureen, however, is established to have lived on the newly-built council estate on the outskirts of the village, which Cressida despises due to its being an ‘eyesore’ in comparison. This snobbery knots into the heart of the novel, with subtle references to the ruin of the village, not to mention some less-subtle victim-blaming of Maureen’s parents, assuming that the murder took place due to neglect at the hands of Maureen’s mother, unlike the very middle-class mothers who would never let such a thing happen to their children, and as such this turns into a somewhat (as far as we can get it with Rowan’s narration) intersectional look at not only how communities band together, but how they lash out in the face of terrible circumstances.

While they never meet each other - while alive - Maureen and Mary Rose share a very similar role within the narrative: we know very little about either of them, not only because of Rowan’s disinterest and fixation with himself and himself alone, but because both are devices demonstrating how young female innocence is devoured by male violence. In the case of Maureen, this is very literal: she is brutally murdered by an unknown assailant, and consequently becomes the face of this violence within the novel. However, considering Mary Rose, this loss of innocence is instead mitigated to her through her mother, who begins to fill her with her own paranoia (as we learn, Cressida has had previous negative experience with men, but I won’t detail them here for the sake of spoilers) and forcibly drags Mary Rose into the world of grief inhabited by the Suttons. While Cressida’s paranoia does go overboard on numerous occasions, the change is increasingly sinister due to the fact that, in the beginning, many of her worries are entirely valid: a girl the same age as her daughter has been murdered in their village, and living alone with her while her (useless) husband is away in London, there is no male protector from the equally male violence just outside the front door. Her behaviour is very similar to that which we can see among internet armchair detectives in the face of modern crimes, especially in her obsession. Alongside turning her cottage into a shrine to Maureen, complete with images taken from the newspapers, Cressida visits the crime scene and regales the neighbours with the gruesome details, and even crashes Maureen’s funeral, much to the distress of the Sutton family. At which point does her behaviour turn from maternal concern to outright fixation? While such a question is up to reader interpretation, I imagine it would be difficult for most to pinpoint an exact page number. Above all, both girls exist as tools for Rowan’s own discomfort: Mary Rose as an alien being to himself, whom he cannot separate from Cressida, and Maureen as a demonstration of the contempt he holds for women and girls throughout the novel. In many cases, his research - concerning a famous female scientist and scholar - is a failure for the same reason as his relationships; he simply cannot view the women in his life as individual people, as opposed to figures who serve specific purposes in his life and in relation to him. In many cases, this contempt (take a drink every time I say the word) boils down to a sweeping rendering of the entire novel - does anyone truly care about poor Maureen Sutton, or just the idea of her?

As befitting its subject matter, THE FATE OF MARY ROSE is a dark look at just how paranoia can seep into the heart of previously secure communities, and demonstrates a distinctly second-wave division between men and women in the face of male violence against women and girls. In a literary market where female rage and complicated women getting revenge is a demand in new releases, the novel is likely to slot into shelves despite the gap between its initial release and now, and even with this degree of separation, is just as ominous to a 2020s audience as to a 1980s audience: after all, the famous ship the Mary Rose sank before it left the harbour, and the reference doesn’t bode well for Blackwood’s Mary Rose either…

*THE FATE OF MARY ROSE is being published by Virago Press on the 7th of November 2024: remember to support your brick-and-mortar bookshops, particularly indies! Thank you to Virago Press and Little, Brown Books for an eArc in exchange for an honest review.

Self-absorbed Rowan Anderson meets Cressida a very pale woman who doesn’t say much about herself and they ended up sleeping together. Rowan doesn’t see her for a couple of months and then she turns up and say she is pregnant. She will not get rid of the child so Rowan Marries her. They have a special relationship, whereas he lives in London with a mistress and Cressida lives in a cottage in Beckenham with their daughter Mary Rose.
When a local girl goes missing and ends up dead. Cressida becomes obsessive to protect her daughter. Even locking her up in her room so that she will be safe but when Rowan finds out she thinks that his wife is losing her mind.
The Fate of the Mary Rose by Caroline Blackwood is a rerelease of a classic tale that was first published in 1981. I wasn’t aware of this when I requested to read it on Netgalley and to be honest a bit apprehensive to read it. But I shouldn’t have worried about this quirky story, and I was so surprised how good this is. This is a great spooky tale, that will keep you reading until the last page. The protagonist though was annoying though he didn’t think past his own ways. They were both as bad as each other. This is a great short read. 5 stars from me.

What a strange unsettling book this is.
I can't describe it, just tell you I really enjoyed it.
I was lured in by the promise of Shirley Jackson like shenanigans, and I personally wasn't disappointed.

The Fate of Mary Rose is a classic psychological thriller first published in 1981 now reissued by Little Brown Books so that a new audience can appreciate one of the most subtly creepy and horrific books of the last century.
Rowan Anderson and his wife Cressida are an odd couple in every sense of the word. Married,as was often the case back then,purely to avoid the social stigma of having a child ,Mary Rose, "born out of wedlock", Anderson at least ,what he sees as the decency to buy a house in a picturesque and pleasant Kentish Village in which to stash his unwanted wife and child out of sight and occasionally makes the odd visit by way of fulfilling his paternal duties.

With their relationship already strained and dysfunctional when a local child meets a particularly nasty end Cressida becomes naturally protective of her rather strange and sickly daughter and unnaturally obsessive about the awful crime.

This is a tale of madness with a cast of mostly deeply unpleasant and distinctly odd people. Rowan is selfish and cold,he expects the wife and child he's virtually exiled to play happy families when he deigns to pay them a visit and is too self-centred and narcissistic to realise that he's little more than an unwelcome stranger to them. Cressida initially appears to be the passive victim of a one-sided relationship then as she slowly unravels and her story unfolds she's seen in a different light. The virtually mute Mary Rose is almost an incidental character but the catalyst of the story.

This is a subtle story that almost ambles along from the domestic situation of the appalling Rowan and the wife it initially appears is doing her best in her quiet way for their daughter into a gripping and almost Gothic tale that is all the more scary for it's nuanced escalation into a genuinely shocking story.

Fans of Shirley Jackson will love this and I'm glad that ,as with her books, modern day readers will have the chance to read and enjoy something pretty special from a master storyteller.