A House and Its Head
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Published in 1935, Ivy Compton-Burnett’s A House and Its Head is a mercilessly composed portrait of domestic tyranny concealed beneath the manners of respectable Victorian society. Set in the 1880s, the novel centres on Duncan Edgeworth, a domineering father whose authority governs his household and whose apparently ordinary family relationships conceal rivalries, humiliations and unspoken cruelties. Through a succession of sharp, deceptively casual conversations, Compton-Burnett reveals the tensions beneath the rituals of family life.
Her characteristic dialogue strips domestic respectability of its reassuring surface, exposing the uses of money, affection, obedience and social position as instruments of power. The effect is at once darkly comic and disturbing: moral authority becomes difficult to distinguish from self-interest, and the family home emerges as a miniature theatre of coercion. One of the author's most celebrated novels, it anticipates later psychological fiction in its unsparing treatment of abuse and its extraordinary ability to make the most civilised exchanges feel dangerous.
From the book
“The family is a little kingdom, and in it we are all subjects.”
— Ivy Compton-Burnett, A House and Its Head
On A House and Its Head
“The merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read.”
— Hilary Mantel, The Telegraph