Brothers &
Sisters

Ivy achieved her full stature with Brothers and Sisters, which is about a wilful woman who inadvertently marries her half brother. In common with most of her novels, this 1929 book revolves around the secrets, evasions and general awfulness of Edwardian family life.

The atmosphere of the novel is claustrophobic from the outset; the narrow social group of the Staces does nothing to enlarge their world, since it is made up of other pairs of brothers and sisters.  Dinah and Andrew become engaged to one of these pairs, Gilbert and Caroline Lang, who have recently moved to the village.  However, these engagements are quickly broken off when it emerges that elderly Mrs Lang is the mother of the adopted Christian Stace, and Dinah and Andrew realise they are engaged to their own uncle and aunt.  Mrs Lang dies suddenly, Christian Stace even more suddenly, and the possibilities of escape for the Stace children open and close as more and more secrets are revealed.

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"Novelists and playwrights have always been tempted by the closed situation, that is, by the confinement of several characters, in a particular place out of which there is no escape, thus providing full scope for complete exploration of the emotions under the most apalling of conditions of restraint. One such place is Hell, in the theological sense; another is the family. Miss Compton-Burnett has chosen the latter for her particular kind of exploration, a situation as closed, terrible and fraught with violence as Hell itself."

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— from the introduction to the Zero Press edition, 1956

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