Manservant and Maidservant (New York Review Books Classics)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
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?"
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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