Ivy Compton-Burnett

Author Information
Ivy Compton-Burnett's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    19 Books
  • First Book:
    June 1951
  • Latest Book:
    August 2022
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Book List in Order: 19 titles

  • Darkness and Day

  • A Family and a Fortune

    Edwin Muir wrote of Ivy Compton-Burnett in the Observer: ''Her literary abilities have been abundantly acknowledged by the majority of her literary contemporaries. Her intense individuality has removed her from the possibility of rivalry... She ta...

  • A God and His Gifts

    First published in 1963, A God and his Gifts was 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...

  • A House and Its Head

    A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said Mary McCarthy of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose austere, savage, and bitingly funny novels anything can happen and no one will ever escape. The long, endlessly surprising conversational duels at...

  • Parents and Children

    Eleanor and Fulbert Sullivan live, with their nine children ranging from nursery to university age, in a huge country house belonging to Fulbert''s parents, Sir Jesse and Lady Regan. Sir Jesse sends Fulbert, his only son, on a business mission to ...

  • The Present and Past

  • The Present and the Past

    'I cannot be parted longer from my sons... I am coming back to my home'

    Nine years after her divorce from Cassius Clare, Catherine decides to re-enter his life. Her decision causes a dramatic upheaval in the Clare family and its im...

  • Manservant and Maidservant

    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 ch...

  • Pastors and Masters

    Ever anxious to keep up apperances, self-avowed intellectual & scholar Nicholas Herrick knows that to involve himself in the running of his own school would be to abase himself to far. Assembling around himself a cast of fittingly fawning friends & a...



  • Elders and Betters

    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-...

  • A Heritage and its History

    A Heritage and Its History tells the story of 69-year-old Sir Edwin Challoner and his extended family. Unmarried, and with no direct issue, Challoner s closest relation, and business associate, is his younger brother, Hamish. When Hamish dies of a...

  • Dolores

    The first edition of Dolores was published in 1911. It sold well, and was promptly forgotten. 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 rebo...

  • The Last and the First

    The Last and the First was Ivy Compton-Burnett's final novel. In it she deals with her familiar themes - tyranny, power and corruption. Although the novel was unfinished at the time of her death in 1969, it combines the brilliant wit and incisive...

  • Two Worlds and Their Ways

    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...

  • Mother and Son

    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 some ...

  • Men and Wives

    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....

  • The Mighty and Their Fall

    With his wife’s death, Ninian Middleton turned to his eldest daughter, Lavinia, as a companion. When, some years later, he decides to marry again, a chasm opens in the life of the young girl whose time he has so jealously possessed. Convoluted atte...

  • More Women Than Men

  • Daughters and Sons



Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Ivy Compton-Burnett has published 19 books.

Ivy Compton-Burnett does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, Daughters and Sons, was published in August 2022.

The first book by Ivy Compton-Burnett, Darkness and Day, was published in June 1951.

No. Ivy Compton-Burnett does not write books in series.
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