The family…. The disintegrating effect of two wars has tended to drive novelists away from the direct treatment of this subject. For Miss Compton-Burnett it is not only the source of her ideas—and therefore of her plots—but also the focus of all other relationships. Her characters are in the first place (as the titles of her novels imply) sons, daughters, wives, brothers, etc., and only in the second place separate individuals with lives of their own. Like the Greek dramatists, with whom she has sometimes been compared, Miss Compton-Burnett finds in the family the central meeting-place of love and hate; so that in the working out of her books tragedy takes the form of a tightening of the family tie, comedy that of a loosening of the same tie, when those who have enough courage escape into the world. (We never follow them into that world...