Ivy Compton-Burnett

A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said Mary McCarthy of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose austere, savage, and bitingly funny novels anything can happen and no one will ever escape. The long, endlessly surprising conversational duels at the center of Compton-Burnett's works are confrontations between the unspoken and the unspeakable, and in them the dynamics of power and desire are dramatized as nowhere else. New York Review Books is reissuing two of the finest novels of this singular modern genius—works that look forward to the blacky comic inventions of Muriel Spark as much as they do back to the drawing rooms of Jane Austen. A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose willful ways provoke a series of transgressions that begins with adultery and ends, much to everyone's relief, in murder.

A House and Its Head

At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?"

Manservant and Maidservant

Pastors and Masters

Brothers and Sisters

"Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of the most original, artful, and elegant writers of our century." — Hilary Mantel When Cassius Clare and his first wife divorced, he insisted upon retaining custody of their two sons; he then remarried and fathered three more children. Now the first Mrs. Clare has returned after nine years' absence, begging to be allowed to visit the children. Cassius takes a malicious pleasure in granting her request, certain that she and the second Mrs. Clare will provide him with an amusing sideshow. Instead, the two women strike up a warm friendship that leaves him out in the cold — and contemplating an attention-getting suicide attempt. Compton-Burnett was known as a writer's writer: Joyce Carol Oates called her work "Aeschylus and Sophocles funnily reinvented by Oscar Wilde"; John Waters described her books as "dark, hilarious, evil little novels"; and V. S. Pritchett, in 1955, noted she was "the most original novelist now writing in English." Discover for yourself why Compton-Burnett is treasured by such a wide range of authors. "Precise, poised, studied, epigrammatic artistry." — Kirkus "Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down." — Ivy Compton-Burnett "A rich story, told with far deeper insight and a bolder, more sure-footed appreciation of subtleties, than I think any of Compton-Burnet's contemporaries could achieve." — The Spectator (U.K.)

The Present and the Past

Hilary Spurling

The exacting Miranda's search for a suitable companion brings her family into contact with a very different kind of household, raising a plenitude of questions about the ability to manage alone, the difficulties of living with strangers and some strange discoveries about intimates.

Mother and Son

An expose of intense family relationships which reveals the wounds beneath the surface of family life. The author has written 20 books, most of which reflect her own personal tragedy and her emotional experiences of World War I.

The Mighty and Their Fall

Dudley Gaveston's inheritance from an elderly godfather changes his relationship with his brother's family

A Family and a Fortune

Darkness and Day

Edwin Muir wrote of Ivy Compton-Burnett in the Observer: 'Her literary abilities have been abundantly acknowledged by the majority of her literary contemporaries. Her intense individuality has removed her from the possibility of rivalry. .. . She takes as her theme the tyrannies and internecine battles of English family life in leisured well-conducted country houses. To Miss Compton-Burnett the family conflict is intimate, unrelenting, very often indecisive and fought out mainly in conversation. . . . The passions which bring distress to her country houses have recently devastated continents.' To present an image of this totally unique writer, we have to imagine a Jane Austen writing, in the present day, Greek prose tragedies (in which the wicked generally triumph) on late Victorian themes. First published in 1939, A Family of a Fortune conveys, largely through dialogue (which may be subtle, humorous, envenomed, or tragic), the effects of death and inheritance on the house of Gaveston - in particular on the relations between Edgar and his selfless younger brother, Dudley. This, apart from the embittered character of Matilda Seaton, is her kindliest novel.

In common with most Ivy Compton-Burnett novels, this 1929 book revolves around the secrets, evasions and general awfulness of Edwardian family life.

A Novel

Reissue of a caustically witty story of the tensions and petty tyrannies in a Victorian household from an essential 20th-century novelist 'Original, artful and elegant... To read her for the first time is a singular experience' Hilary Mantel Horace Lamb runs an austere household with tyrannical force and cruel thrift. His five children shiver through the winter and learn that a fire is not a thing to be taken for granted. Hierarchies are more lightly enforced in the servants' quarters, where Bullivant and Mrs Selden attempt to rein in their young charges. When Horace suddenly turns attentive and caring, the real difficulties begin: the taut order of the household slackens, setting loose old grievances. Her own favourite among her novels, Manservant and Maidservant is Ivy Compton-Burnett at her witty, lacerating best. A ruthless satire of power struggles and petty economies, it exposes the violence and cruelty at the core of Victorian family life.

More women than men

First published in 1963, A God and his Gifts was the last of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels to be published in her lifetime and is considered by many to be one of her best. Set in the claustrophobic world of Edwardian upper-class family life, it is the story of the self-willed and arrogant Hereward Egerton. In his marriage to Ada Merton he maintains a veneer of respectability but through his intimate relationships with his sister, Emmeline, and his son's future wife, Hetty, he steps beyond the bounds of conventional morality with both comic and tragic results...

A God and His Gifts

Two Worlds and Their Ways

The Last and the First was Ivy Compton-Burnett's final novel. In it she deals with her familiar themes - tyranny, power and corruption. Although the novel was unfinished at the time of her death in 1969, it combines the brilliant wit and incisive insight into human relationships which make her one of the most original novelists in English literature.

Ivy Compton-Burnett

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