A House & Its Head
1935
Whenever she was asked which of her novels were her favourites, Ivy always referred to A House and Its Head as being one of them.
Among the most unsparing of Compton-Burnett's books, A House and Its Head dissects the domestic establishment of Duncan Edgeworth.
Duncan is a tyrannical pater familias who can't stop remarrying, while his daughters can't get married at all. And Grant, Duncan's nephew, can't stop fooling around.
Soon enough the family's conflicting interests set off a series of increasingly appalling transgressions, made all the more scary by the ease with which, in the end, the survivors accept the results.
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Apparently unswayed by any temptation to sweeten the bitter pill she is prescribing for her readers, unwilling to offer us the faintest redemptive consolation or even hope, Ivy Compton-Burnett never waivers in telling us what she sees, or what she believes. When, at the end of A House and Its Head, Duncan Edgeworth makes his final godlike pronouncement ("You are all at my hand to be taught"), we understand that what he — and his household — have imparted to us is a series of chilling lessons about the depths to which people will sink for the lowest possible reasons, and about the mortal and near-mortal injuries sustained, and somehow survived, in the grisly Darwinian combat that we so fondly call family life.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
"It is as if one's next door neighbour leaned over the garden wall, and remarked, in the same breath and chatty tone, that he had mown the lawn in the morning and thrust the wife's head in the gas-oven after lunch."
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The Church Times on A House and Its Head
