HOUSE AND ITS HEAD
By: Ivy Compton Burnett
During the 1920s, this author was well known and was admired for her darkly comic and deeply subversive novels. Writing almost entirely in dialogue, she stage a series of conversational duels in which the destructive inter action of power, desire and domesticity are dramatized. Here too , one of the most unsparing of her novels , Duncan is a tyrannical patter families who cannot stop remarrying, while his daughters cannot get married at all and his nephew cannot stop fooling around. Soon the family’s conflicting interests sets off a series of increasingly appalling actions made al the more terrifying by the ease with which in the end the survivors accept the results.
