A Heritage & Its History
1959
The great Victorian mansion that holds and tyrannizes the Challoner family appears, at the rise of the curtain, to be formal and still as a painted background. But in its every corner lurks a deadly truth.
And the Challoners themselves - who seem at their first stately entrance to be inhumanly self-possessed, articulate and witty — bare their humanness in a series of diamond-sharp revelations, until they stand exposed, cruelly bound to one another and to all the living by love, pride, greed, by marriage, adultery, incest, and death.
Reading this complexly plotted story — its action verging on melodrama, its epigrammatic conversations flashing against a somber background — the reader is exposed to the unique Compton-Burnett Effect: one's own world seems, in contrast, almost fictional, facile, retouched. For here sons speaking to fathers, wives to their husbands, lovers to their mistresses, all say what they feel, articulating with a brilliant and shocking precision the truths about ourselves that we leave unspoken, unacknowledged.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
"Possibly the most consistently original literary contribution of the last half century."
​​
Kay Dick, Queen
