Bitter Inheritance

by Joyce Johnson

In Black Tors, on a bleak Cornish moor, the Grayhurst family squabble over a rumoured secret inheritance. Emma Cotleigh is nurse/companion to widowed matriarch Alice, who carries her own dark secrets. Into this web of intrigue and deceit Australian Brad Grayhurst arrives to fulfil a promise to his dying father to reconcile the family feuds. Dramatic events destroy Black Tors, nearly killing Alice, before revealing its mysterious secret. Now Emma and Brad are free to fall in love.

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 12, 1999

About the author

Born Joyce Glassman to a Jewish family in Queens, New York, Joyce was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, just around the corner from the apartment of William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer Burroughs. Allen Ginsberg and Kerouac were frequent visitors to Burroughs' apartment.

At the age of 13, Joyce rebelled against her controlling parents and began hanging out in Washington Square. She matriculated at Barnard College at 16, failing her graduation by one class. It was at Barnard that she became friends with Elise Cowen (briefly Allen Ginsberg's lover) who introduced her to the Beat circle. Ginsberg arranged for Glassman and Kerouac to meet on a blind date.

Joyce was married briefly to abstract painter James Johnson, who was killed in a motorcycle accident. From her second marriage to painter Peter Pinchbeck, which ended in divorce, came her son, Daniel Pinchbeck, also an author and co-founder of Open City literary magazine.

Since 1983 she has taught writing, primarily at Columbia University's MFA program, but also at the Breadloaf Writers Conference, the University of Vermont and New York University. In 1992 she received an NEA grant.