More Women Than Men
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Pushkin Press
Published:27th May '21
Should be back in stock very soon
As another term begins at her girls' school, Josephine Napier reasserts her iron grip over her teachers and family. Her air of studied self-sacrifice conceals ruthless manipulation, but with the introduction of a male teacher to her staff and the return of an old rival for her husband's affections, the mask begins to slip. Old deceptions and new rivalries come to the surface, and the starched perfection of her life is threatened. A consummate expression of Ivy Compton-Burnett's unique style, full of viciously witty dialogue laced with double meanings and veiled insults, More Women Than Men is a masterful dissection of gender and power by an essential twentieth-century writer.
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 *
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
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
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
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
Darkly acerbic critiques * Vogue *
A radical thinker, one of our rare modern heretics -- Mary McCarthy
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
It is almost certain that her powerful novels will gain in significance and be thought of, in time, as some of the finest writing of our century -- Guy Davenport * New York Times *
ISBN: 9781911590415
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages