A House and Its Head

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.

Author: Ivy Compton-Burnett
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 02/28/2001
Pages: 304
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.66lbs
Size: 7.98h x 4.98w x 0.80d
ISBN13: 9780940322646
ISBN10: 0940322641
BISAC Categories:
- Fiction | Family Life | General
- Fiction | Humorous | Black Humor
- Fiction | Satire

About the Author
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1892-1969) wrote over fifteen novels about the upper classes of the late Victorian period. The novels are constructed almost entirely of seemingly banal dialogue that eventually reveals, beneath its surface, the truths of human nature and insights into human relationships which Compton-Burnett took as her themes. Her works include Pastors and Masters, A Family and a Fortune, Manservant and Maidservant, and A House and Its Head.

Francine Prose is the author of three collections of stories and ten novels. Her most recent novel, The Blue Angel, was nominated for the National Book Award.