'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
The electrically witty story of a headmistress struggling to retain an iron grip on the hidden plots and allegiances in her girls' school, reissued for the first time in decades.
At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?"
Acerbic, brutal and mordantly funny: Ivy ComptonBurnett's most unsparing dissection of the patriarchal family, finally back in print.