More Women Than Men

Description

'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 Josephine Napier maintains order in her girls' school through a benevolent exterior of self-sacrifice. But when a new, male teacher and a figure from her husband's past upset her environment's delicate equilibrium, the darker shades of her authority begin to show and a ruthless struggle for power begins. Tense and subversively witty, More Women Than Men is a masterful unveiling of the covert allegiances and fierce conflicts produced by a claustrophobic world. '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

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.

'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 'Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life' - Daily Telegraph