A House and Its Head

Description

Duncan Edgeworth rules over his family with steely authority in a country village of idyllic beauty, rapacious gossip and motives of the purest malignity. A crowd of neighbours watches on as Duncan's scandalous remarriage sparks the chaos that will engulf his family and set off a battle of wills in their tangled community. Unfolding almost entirely in dialogue of vicious wit and layered implications, A House and its Head is a brutally funny demolition of Victorian patriarchal authority and the hypocrisy of English society. Republished after decades out of print, it confirms Ivy Compton-Burnett's status as the twentieth century's greatest chronicler of the violent dysfunction of families.

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of twentieth-century England's most admired writers. The seventh of thirteen children, she was raised in Richmond and Hove and studied Classics at Royal Holloway College. Her family was struck by repeated disasters starting with the death of her father in 1901; Compton-Burnett eventually took charge of the household until it was broken up during the First World War. Compton-Burnett lived alone in London until she was joined in 1919 by Margaret Jourdain, a writer and furniture expert who was to be her lifelong companion. Aside from a disavowed early novel, Compton-Burnett published eighteen highly acclaimed works of fiction in her lifetime, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was made a Dame shortly before her death.

'Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of the most original, artful and elegant writers of our century. To read her for the first time is a singular experience' - Hilary Mantel 'As much a part of our great 20th-century literary heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen... She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde' - Guardian