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Manservant & Maidservant
1947
This novel was also published successfully in the United States under the title Bullivant and the Lambs. Whenever Ivy was asked which of her novels were her favorites, she always mentioned Manservant and Maidservant and A House and Its Head.
Manservant and Maidservant is among the funniest and most surprising of Compton-Burnett's inventions. It focuses on the household of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant, a man whose children fear and hate him and whose wife is planning to elope. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin.
CRITICAL ACCLAIM
"Miss Compton-Burnett is immensely unfair to most other contemporary British novelists.... Her apparently effortless skill shows them up. They seem to be breathing too hard by comparison."
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New York Herald Tribune
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