It is Christmas Day, 1885, and the Edgeworths are at each other's throats again. Duncan holds his wife and children captive to his authoritarian whims; every day brings fresh struggles for power. Before breakfast is over, there will be presents in the fire. When illness strikes the family, volatile tensions are unleashed that result in scandal, adultery and murder, while a crowd of gossiping neighbours watches gleefully on. A brutally funny demolition of patriarchal authority, A House and Its Head confirms Ivy Compton-Burnett's status as one of the unique stylists of twentieth-century English fiction, and its greatest chronicler of the violent dysfunction of families.

About the Author
Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of twentieth-century England's most original and 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.

Reviews
'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



Book Information
ISBN 9781911590392
Author Ivy Compton-Burnett
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint ONE
Publisher Pushkin Press