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 MantelHorace 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...

'Original, artful and elegant... To read her for the first time is a singular experience' Hilary MantelThe electrically witty story of a headmistress struggling to retain an iron grip on the hidden plots and allegiances in her girls' school, reissued for the first time in decadesAs another term begins at her girls' school, Josephine Napier reasserts her iron grip over her teachers and family. Her air of studied self-sacrifice conceals ruthless manipulation, but with the introduction of a male teacher to her staff and the return of an old rival for her husband's affections, the mask begins to slip. Old deceptions and new rivalries come to the surface, and the starched perfection of her life is threatened.A consummate expression of Ivy Compton-Burnett's unique style, full of viciously witty dialogue laced with double meanings and veiled insults, More Women Than Men is a masterful dissection of gender and power by an essential...

'Original, artful and elegant... To read her for the first time is a singular experience' Hilary Mantel'Cruel genius' Maggie NelsonSabine Ponsonby presides over her large household with despotic force, rivalled only by her imperious daughter, Hetta. As her needling cruelties cause one governess after another to flee, the family's younger generation begins to stir in revolt, and the seeds for a reckoning are sown.Written in Ivy Compton-Burnett's iconic style, where dialogue seethes with veiled insults and manipulations, Daughters and Sons is an acidic comedy of cold deceptions, mistaken identities and family struggles for dominance.

'The merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read' HILARY MANTELIvy Compton-Burnett's mordantly funny, unsparing dissection of the patriarchal family, back in print with an introduction by Hilary MantelIt is Christmas Day, 1885, and the Edgeworths are at each other's throats again. Duncan holds his wife and children captive to his authoritarian whims; every day brings fresh struggles for power. Before breakfast is over, there will be presents in the fire.When illness strikes the family, volatile tensions are unleashed that result in scandal, adultery and murder, while a crowd of gossiping neighbours watches gleefully on.A brutally funny demolition of patriarchal authority, A House and Its Head confirms Ivy Compton-Burnett's status as one of the unique stylists of twentieth-century English fiction, and its greatest chronicler of the violent dysfunction of families.

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. In A Family of a Fortune she conveys, largely through dialogue (which may be subtle, humorous, envenomed, or tragic), the effects of death and inheritance on the house of Gaveston -...

A Heritage and its History tells the story of 69 year old Sir Edwin Challoner, and his extended family. Unmarried, and with no direct issue, Challoner's closest relation, and business associate, is his younger brother Hamish. When Hamish dies of a heart condition, his son Simon prepares to take over as head of the house, as everyone assumes that Sir Edwin will also die in a matter of months. However, Sir Edwin surprises everyone by announcing his marriage to Rhoda, his neighbour, also more than 40 years his junior. Following the return from their honeymoon, Rhoda succumbs to a moment of unbridled passion with Simon, her new husband's nephew. When Rhoda falls pregnant, there is no question who has fathered the child. A Heritage and its History, gets right to the heart of this family as it splits into factions, growing increasingly bitter and resentful. The reader watches on in amazement as two families become more and more entangled, and the path to the inheritance...

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...

Eleanor and Fulbert Sullivan live, with their nine children ranging from nursery to university age, in a huge country house belonging to Fulbert's parents, Sir Jesse and Lady Regan. Sir Jesse sends Fulbert, his only son, on a business mission to South America. News comes of Fulbert's death, and his executor, Ridley Cranmer, plans an impulsive marriage to Eleanor... but is Fulbert really dead? And what is the mystery surrounding the parentage of the three strange Marlowes living in genteel penury on the fringe of the great estate? Parents and Children is less savage in theme than some of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fiction and, with its richly funny scenes with the children and happily resolved ending, makes a perfect introduction to this distinguished author's highly individual world - a closed world of intense relationships within late Victorian upper-class families, a world in which the normally unspoken is stated and the unthinkable enacted, with dark revelations blandly emerging...

The Last and the First was Ivy Compton-Burnett's final novel in which 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.

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.

Sefton and his sister Clemence are dispatched to separate boarding schools. Their father's second marriage, as well as their mother's economies, provides perfect opportunities for mockery, and home becomes a source of shame. More wretched is their mother's insistence that they excel. Their desperate means to please her incite adult opprobrium, but how did the children learn to deceive? Here staccato dialogue, brittle aphorisms and an excoriating wit are used to unparalleled and subversive effect ruthlessly to expose the wounds beneath the surface of family life.

The first edition of Dolores was published in 1911. It sold well, and was promptly forgotten. But now that her career of sixty years is ended, and her long achievement more and more acclaimed, Dolores, standing at that remote beginning is curiously reborn.

The Donne family's move to the country is inspired by a wish to be close to their cousins, who are to be their nearest neighbours. It proves too close for comfort, however. For a secret switching of wills causes the most genteel pursuit of self-interest to threaten good relations and even good manners... Ivy Compton-Burnett employs her sharp ear for comedy and celebrated powers of dialogue to spectacular effect. She reveals a devastating microcosm of human society, in which the elders are by no means always the betters, in which no character is totally scrupulous, but none without their appeal.

At the centre of this novel stands Harriet Haslam, the epitome of the maternal power figure, whose genuine but overpowering love dominates the novel and whose self-knowledge drives her into insanity. Even after her death Harriet continues to dominate. Surrounding this central figure are a host of marvelously realised characters - Sir Geoffrey Haslam, Harriet's husband, an innocent self-deluder; Dominic Spong, a hypocrite whose platitudes do not quite conceal his powerful self-interest; Agatha Calkin whose benevolent maternalism nearly hides the greediest of drives towards power; Lady Hardistry, the most outrageously witty of all sophisticates; Camilla Christy, a loose woman, dazzling, charming, and corrupt. Unlike Harriet Haslam, who will not spare herself the truth, the others are happier with their lies and can never achieve Harriet's grandeur.

With his wife's death, Ninian Middleton turned to his eldest daughter, Lavinia, as a companion. When, some years later, he decides to marry again, a chasm opens in the life of the young girl whose time he has so jealously possessed. Convoluted attempts are made to prevent this marriage – and others – and the seams of intense family relationships are torn, with bitter consequences. Astringent, succinct and always subversive, Ivy Compton-Burnett wields her scalpel-like pen to vehemently dissect the passions and duplicity of the Middleton family.