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
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
When Sir Ransom Chace is reunited with his god-daughter Bridget, and her husband Edmund Gaunt, long dead secrets start to creep out of the wood-work. Chace and Gaunt both have two daughters borne out of happy marriages, but both have also fathered another
