Dangerous Muse: a life of Caroline Blackwood Nancy Schoenberger Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 336pp, £20 ISBN 0297841017

Anyone writing about Caroline Blackwood is forced to think hard about the nature and purpose of biography. Blackwood was one of those writers whose fame rested entirely on her relationship with other people. Her father was the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, her mother, was a Guinness heiress, making Blackwood that sexy combination of very rich and very posh (it was also due to her parents, presumably, that she was able to complete the hat trick by being very beautiful as well). In adult life she married three remarkable men - Lucian Freud, Israel Citkowitz and Robert Lowell, two of whom produced their best creative work in response to her disturbing presence (the third simply froze completely).

Nancy Schoenberger insists on calling her biography of Blackwood Dangerous Muse. Yet almost from the beginning she reveals her unease with the implication that Blackwood is interesting mainly because of the art she inspired in others (in particular, Freud's portraits Girl in Bed and Girl Reading and Lowell's poetic sequence The Dolphin). Having hastily admitted that the idea of the passive, gazed-upon "muse" really doesn't wash in these feminist times, Schoenberger then sets about trying to prove that Blackwood was an important creative artist in her own right.

The problem is that these days no one remembers Blackwood's clutch of novels, still less her journalism and book-length non-fiction. This puts Schoenberger in the tricky position of having to talk up the importance of each book as it appears in the narrative, while simultaneously plodding through a plot summary. One feels that Schoenberger is torn between doing her duty as a good American female academic who wants to stress her subject's autonomous significance, and the desire to slip back into easy cliches about Blackwood entrancing every man she met with her witchy stare and Silk Cut growl.

Still, few deny that Caroline Blackwood was an extraordinarily compelling woman. Wherever there was any action - creative, artistic or intellectual - you could be pretty sure to find her at its heart. Schoenberger is particularly good at describing Soho - "as much a state of mind as a place" - through which Blackwood tottered (she was already drinking too much) through the Fifties. By this time she was married to Lucian Freud, who had left his first wife and child for her. For five chaotic years, Freud painted and gambled and hung out in the Colony Club with Francis Bacon, while Lady Caroline (there can be no doubt that, for all his distinguished pedigree, Freud enjoyed his wife's even more) mostly waited for things to happen.

When they didn't, she split for America, eventually marrying a man who resembled Freud and was, in his own way, just as talented. But while Freud had been inspired by Caroline, producing that string of portraits which people would scramble to see and own, Israel Citkowitz seems to have gone into a deep creative slumber. He stopped composing his avant-garde music, and put all his rather doddery energies (he was 20 years older than Caroline) into looking after their three daughters.

But it was with the American poet Robert Lowell that things became truly chaotic. His manic depression led Blackwood - who, for all her boozing, was not mad - an impossible dance of sudden highs and deep, searing lows. Despite producing a child together, a much-wanted son, the couple eventually parted, but not before Lowell had written The Dolphin, chronicling in queasy detail the split from his previous wife, the poet Elizabeth Hardwick. Blackwood, meanwhile, took away from the marriage a determination to become a serious writer at last. It was during these middle-aged, post-Lowell years that she settled down to produce the best of her work, including the Booker-nominated Great Granny Webster, an evocation of her Anglo-Irish manor house childhood.

Schoenberger's task is not made easy by the way that so much of Blackwood's essence seems to have evaporated away from the slight body of work she left behind. Her dark wit was apparently far more penetrating when delivered by means of her tongue than it ever was in anything she wrote. And while the photographs included in the book suggest her beauty, they cannot convey her extraordinary physical presence. Denied the chance to see and hear Blackwood and understand her power, we are left with the story of a grubby drunk who spread so much gloom that any need for the deus ex machina of the "Guinness curse" (car crashes, sudden falls from horses) was rendered quite redundant.

Kathryn Hughes is a biographer and critic

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