She was born into an aristocratic British family, the eldest child of the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava and of Maureen Constance Guinness.

Caroline Maureen Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood was born on 16 July 1931 at 4 Hans Crescent in Knightsbridge, her parents' London home.

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.

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.

[citation needed] 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 was a book looking at the hunting and the hunt saboteur fraternities.

[5][6] On 22 June 1978, Natalya, Blackwood's eldest daughter with Citkowitz, died at age 17 from postural asphyxia due to a drug overdose.

Lowell suffered from bipolar disorder, and Blackwood reacted to his manic episodes with distress, confusion, feelings of uselessness, and fear about the effects on their children.

In 1977, Lowell died, reportedly clutching one of Freud's portraits of Blackwood, while in the back seat of a New York cab.

[citation needed] Ten years later, in 1987, she returned to the United States, settling in a large house in Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island in New York.

Although her abilities were reduced by alcoholism, she continued to write; her work of that era includes two memoirs, of Princess Margaret and of Francis Bacon, published in The New York Review of Books in 1992.

[10] On 14 February 1996, Lady Caroline Blackwood died from cancer, at the Mayfair Hotel on Park Avenue in New York City, aged 64.