"The first and till now the only edition of Dolores was published by Blackwood's in 1911. It sold well, and was promptly forgotten; apparently even its author did not want to remember it, since she did not publish another novel until 1925, nor did she include Dolores, the first of her twenty novels, in later lists of her publications.

"But now that her career of sixty years is ended, and her long achievement more and more acclaimed, Dolores, standing at that remote beginning, is curiously reborn. When a writer is alive, his works tend to be regarded one by one, as they appear; when he is dead, they tend to be seen as the whole they have become. The genesis of genius attracts a natural speculation. If the author of Dolores preferred to forget it, her readers will not."

— from the dust jacket of the 1971 Blackwood reprint

Pastors and Masters (1925)

Her first mature novel.

"The characters in this lively, quick-witted comedy of manners have a talent for talking without ever saying what they think, as that would 'not always be politic'. Displaying her penchant for dialogue to superb effect, Ivy Compton-Burnett allows them to catch themselves — and each other — out."

— from the back cover of the Allison & Busby edition, 1984

Brothers and Sisters (1929)

"Novelists and playwrights have always been tempted by the closed situation, that is, by the confinement of several characters, in a particular place out of which there is no escape, thus providing full scope for complete exploration of the emotions under the most apalling of conditions of restraint. One such place is Hell, in the theological sense; another is the family. Miss Compton-Burnett has chosen the latter for her particular kind of exploration, a situation as closed, terrible and fraught with violence as Hell itself."

— from the introduction to the Zero Press edition, 1956

Men and Wives (1931)

"At the centre of this novel stands Harriet Haslam, the epitome of the maternal power figure, whose genuine but overpowering love dominates the novel and whose self-knowledge drives her into insanity. Even after her death Harriet continues to dominate.

"Surrounding this central figure are a host of marvellously realised characters — Sir Geoffrey Haslam, Harriet's husband, an innocent self-deluder; Dominic Spong, a hypocrite whose platitudes do not quite conceal his powerful self-interest; Agatha Calkin whose benevolent maternalism nearly hides the greediest of drives towards power; Lady Hardisty, the most outrageously witty of all sophisticates; Camilla Christy, a loose woman, dazzling, charming, and corrupt. Unlike Harriet Haslam, who will not spare herself the truth, the others are happier with their lies and can never achieve Harriet's gradeur."

— from the back cover of the Allison & Busby edition, 1984

More Women Than Men (1933)

"Josephine Napier, headmistress of a girls' school, is a woman whose mask of amiable authority disguises a ruthless ability to manipulate others. But past and present conspire to threaten her absolute control of the school and her tight circle of friends. The machinations that follow draw the reader into a claustrophobic world of personal and sexual relations revealed through dialogue of a razor-edged politeness and wit. A sophisticated comedy of manners ..."

— from the back cover of the Allison & Busby edition, 1983

A House and Its Head (1935)

Whenever she was asked which of her novels were her favorites, Ivy always referred to A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant.

"Among the most unsparing of Compton-Burnett's books, A House and Its Head dissects the domestic establishment of Duncan Edgeworth. Duncan is a tyrannical pater familias who can't stop remarrying, while his daughters can't get married at all. And Grant, Duncan's nephew, can't stop fooling around. Soon enough the family's conflicting interests set off a series of increasingly appalling transgressions, made all the more scary by the ease with which, in the end, the survivors accept the results."

Daughters and Sons (1937)

"At 85 years of age Sabine Ponsonby seldom speaks anything but evil of any human being and maintains a tyrannous control over her large family. Ironically, however, a secret act of kindness proves her undoing, causing her manipulations to lead to drastic and untoward results. Ivy Compton-Burnett is a master of the well-chosen phrase and telling juxtaposition. In this, one of the lightest and most comic of her novels, she presents a large cast of vivacious and quick-witted characters who, under the cloak of polite conversation, set about each other with verbal swords."

— from the back cover of the Allison & Busby edition, 1984

A Family and a Fortune (1939)

"Ivy Compton-Burnett's unique genius lay in her ability to convey, using the delicate undertones of drawing-room conversation, the major experiences of life and the intrinsic emotions of the heart. In A Family and a Fortune, through the central characters of Edgar Gaveston, his selfless younger brother Dudley, and the embittered Matilda Seaton, she examines the bizarre and terrible effects of death and inheritance."

— from the back cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, 1983

Parents and Children (1941)

"Ranging from nursery to university age, the nine Sullivan children live with their parents, Eleanor and Fulbert, in a huge country house belonging to Fulbert's parents, Sir Jesse and Lady Regan. Sir Jesse then sends Fulbert, his only son, on a business mission to South America. The news follows of Fulbert's death, and his executor, Ridly Cranmer, plans impulsive marriage to Eleanor ... but is Fulbert really dead?"

— from the back cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, 1985

Elders and Betters (1944)

"The Donne family's move to the country is inspired by a wish to be close to their cousins, who are to be their nearest neighbours. It proves too close for comfort, however. For a secret switching of wills causes the most genteel pursuit of self-interest to threaten good relations and even good manners ...

"Ivy Compton-Burnett employs her sharp ear for comedy and celebrated powers of dialogue to spectacular effect. She reveals a devastating microcosm of human society, in which the elders are by no means always the betters, in which no character is totally scrupulous, but none without their appeal."

— from the back cover of the Allison & Busby edition, 1983

Manservant and Maidservant (1947)

Her one novel to be successful in the United States, where it was published 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."

Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949)

"Sefton and his sister Clemence are dispatched to separate boarding schools. Their father's second marriage, their mother's economies, provide perfect opportunities for mockery, and home becomes a source of shame. More wretched is their mother's insistence that they excel. Their desperate means to please her incite adult opprobrium, but how did the children learn to deceive? Here staccato dialogue, brittle aphorisms and an excoriating wit are used to unparalleled and subversive effect ruthlessly to expose the wounds beneath the surface of family life."

— from the back cover of the Virago Modern Classics edition, 1990

Darkness and Day (1951)

"Why had Edmund and Bridget Gaunt and their daughters been away from home? Because some decades earlier Edmund has fathered an illegitimate daughter. Because more recently he had become convinced that Bridget, the orphan whom he had married, was that daughter — in short that he had married, all unwittingly, his own child, and that his two small daughters were also his two small grandaughters. What happens when a dignified man comes to believe that his wife is also his daughter?"

— from the dust jacket of the Knopf edition

The Present and the Past (1953)

"Cassius Clare is the father of five children; two by his first wife from whom he is divorced, and three by his second wife who conscientiously tries to be a mother to all five. The first Ms. Clare implores Cassius to let her visit her children. At first flattered by the suggestion of a harem implicit in the situation, then maliciously foreseeing the predicament which is likely to arise, he consents. To his dismay, the tactless return of the first Mrs. Clare results in an intimate friendship between the two women who have shared this singularly unlovable husband; neither pays any heed to him."

— from the dust jacket of the Julian Messner edition

Mother and Son (1955)

"The exacting Miranda's search for a suitable companion brings her family into contact with a very different kind of household, raising a plenitude of questions about the ability to manage alone, the difficulties of living with strangers and, indeed, some strange discoveries about intimates. As secrets are revealed, tables are beautifully arranged, family bonds are fiercely shaken and new proposals are made.... Compton-Burnett casts an unflinching and acerbic eye on the nature of companionship and the fear of being alone."

— from the back cover of the Virago Modern Classics edition, 1994

In 1955 Mother and Son won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

"Miles Mowbray, the central figure ... is one of Ivy Compton-Burnett's most successful domestic dictators in the marriage of comedy with sheer awfulness. His three daughters become mere symbols of powerlessness, in their bondage to him and to their unmarried state. Language is their only weapon, and this they use to devastating effect."

— from the back cover of the Oxford University Press edition, 1984

A Heritage and Its History (1959)

"The great Victorian mansion that holds and tyrannizes the Challoner family appears, at the rise of the curtain, to be formal and still as a painted background. But in its every corner lurks a deadly truth.

"And the Challoners themselves — who seem at their first stately entrance to be inhumanly self-possessed, articulate and witty — bare their humanness in a series of diamond-sharp revelations, until they stand exposed, cruelly bound to one another and to all the living by love, pride, greed, by marriage, adultery, incest, and death.

"Reading this complexly plotted story — its action verging on melodrama, its epigrammatic conversations flashing against a somber background — the reader is exposed to the unique Compton-Burnett Effect: one's own world seems, in contrast, almost fictional, facile, retouched. For here sons speaking to fathers, wives to their husbands, lovers to their mistresses, all say what they feel, articulating with a brilliant and shocking precision the truths about ourselves that we leave unspoken, unacknowledged."

— from the dust jacket of the first U.S. edition, Simon & Schuster, 1959

The Mighty and Their Fall (1961)

"The sharp new insights of The Mighty and Their Fall are wrought from classic Compton-Burnett material: the large county family of fading prospects, the egotistical widower, the new stepmother, the despised governess, the hidden will, the clandestine attempt to prevent a marriage, the return of the prodigal — and the perfect artistry that holds the reader entranced as the secret, astonishing, authentic wellsprings of our behavior are suddenly revealed."

— from the dust jacket of the first U.S. edition, Simon and Schuster, 1962

A God and His Gifts (1963)

"... the last of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels to be published in her lifetime and is considered by many to be one of her best. Set in the claustrophobic world of Edwardian upper-class family life, it is the story of the self-willed and arrogant Hereward Egerton. In his marriage to Ada Merton he maintains a veneer of respectability but through his intimate relationships with her sister, Emmeline, and his son's future wife, Hetty, he steps beyond the bounds of conventional morality with both comic and tragic results."

—from the back cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, 1983

The Last and the First (1971)

"The Last and the First is the final novel of the great English writer. It was found, complete (though without her final editing), in her home after her death [in 1969]. Like the great series of novels that preceded it ... it is a major work of comedy and melodrama in Victorian family life — as sharp, spare, and funny as it is profound."

— from the dust jacket of the first U.S. edition, Knopf, 1971