A Family and a Fortune

✍ Scribed by Compton-Burnett, Ivy

• Book ID: 108062373
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Year: 2013
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 204 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781448204182

✦ Synopsis

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 takes as her theme the tyrannies and internecine battles of English family life in leisured well-conducted country houses. To Miss Compton-Burnett the family conflict is intimate, unrelenting, very often indecisive and fought out mainly in conversation. . . . The passions which bring distress to her country houses have recently devastated continents.' To present an image of this totally unique writer, we have to imagine a Jane Austen writing, in the present day, Greek prose tragedies (in which the wicked generally triumph) on late Victorian themes. In A Family of a Fortune she conveys, largely through dialogue (which may be subtle, humorous, envenomed, or tragic), the effects of death and inheritance on the house of Gaveston -...