A House and Its Head

Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of the most original, artful and elegant writers of our century. To read her for the first time is a singular experience -- Hilary Mantel
Shrewd, sly, mordantly funny and magnificently odd, few literary voices are as distinctive, or as entertaining, as Ivy Compton-Burnett's. To see a novel of hers back in print is always a cause for celebration -- Sarah Waters
Compton-Burnett anatomised primal emotions in a genteel arena: there are shades of Jane Austen here, as well as Pinter and Muriel Spark, but she remains entirely original - funny, shocking, horribly true -- Justine Jordan * Guardian *
She is as much part of our great twentieth-century fictional heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen... She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde * Guardian *
Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life * Daily Telegraph *
What I find so invigorating in Compton-Burnett is not her alleged cruelty, but her unwillingness to let anyone off the hook when it comes to the complexities of truth-telling... cruel genius -- Maggie Nelson
Hilarious, harrowing... [like] Jane Austen on bad drugs -- Francine Prose, author of Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
Absolutely sui generis... Her remorseless humor and savagery are a unique cocktail. There's no middle ground with this novelist-you're either bewildered by her or you become an addict * BOMB *
A remarkable and unusual novelist, who has, in her own well-tilled field, no rival and no parallel * TLS *
Dark, hilarious, evil... I have all twenty of her novels and I've read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself -- John Waters
A radical thinker, one of our rare modern heretics -- Mary McCarthy
Darkly acerbic critiques * Vogue *
To re-read an utterly original writer like Virginia Woolf or Ivy Compton-Burnett is to be reminded how narrow is the domain of the traditional novel and what worlds, inner and outer, still wait to be explored -- Gabriel Josipovici
I looked for all her novels... I loved them furiously -- Natalia Ginzburg