A House and Its Head (New York Review Books Classics)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
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.
About the Author
IVY COMPTON-BURNETT (1884-1969) was the seventh child of an English homeopath, and the first of seven additional children born to his second wife. She grew up in the coastal town of Hove and read classics at London University before returning home to help her widowed mother care for her younger siblings. Her favorite brother died of pneumonia at the age of twenty, while a second brother, Noel, who may have helped with the writing of her first (later disclaimed) novel Dolores, was killed in the First World War. Two sisters committed suicide together in 1917, after which Compton-Burnett herself suffered a prolonged nervous collapse. The Great War, she said, left her "smashed up." In 1925, at the age of forty-one, she published Pastors and Masters, the first of nineteen novels written in her mature manner; the last, A God and His Gifts, appeared in 1963. Both A House and Its Head (1935) and Manservant and Maidservant (1947) are available as New York Review Books.
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