A House and Its Head

'The merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read' HILARY MANTEL

Ivy Compton-Burnett's mordantly funny, unsparing dissection of the patriarchal family, back in print with an introduction by Hilary Mantel

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.



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. 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.