Personal life
Blackwood was married three times, and had four children.
Lucian Freud, married 9 December 1953, divorced 1959.
Israel Citkowitz, married 15 August 1959, divorced 1972, three daughters, including Natalya, Eugenia, and Ivana
Robert Lowell, married 21 October 1972, one son.
Ann Fleming, the wife of Ian Fleming, introduced Blackwood to Lucian Freud. After they started seeing each other, the couple eloped in Paris on 9 December 1953.
By 1966, when Blackwood and Citkowitz's youngest child was born, their marriage was over. Citkowitz continued to live nearby and helped raise their daughters until his death.
During the mid-1960s, Blackwood had an affair with Robert Silvers, a founder and co-editor of The New York Review of Books. He stayed close to the family thereafter. According to Ivana, she and Silvers both suspected that he was her biological father. But Blackwood revealed on her deathbed that Ivana's father was another lover: the screenwriter Ivan Moffat. He was a grandson of actor-manager Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree and his wife.
On 22 June 1978, Natalya, Blackwood's eldest daughter with Citkowitz, died at age 17 from postural asphyxia due to a drug overdose.
Blackwood and Lowell lived in London and at Milgate House in Kent. The sequence of poems in Lowell's The Dolphin (1973) provides a disrupted narrative of his involvement with Blackwood and the birth of their son. (Lowell's friend, fellow poet Elizabeth Bishop, strongly advised Lowell not to publish the book, advice he ignored). 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. He was returning to his former wife, the writer Elizabeth Hardwick.
Ten years later, in 1987, she moved 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.
