One of the most prolific writers of this century, I. Compton-Burnett (as she signed her works) produced twenty novels during a fifty-year writing career that extended from 1911 (with the publication of Dolores, a youthful novel that she later disclaimed) to 1971, with the posthumous publication of The Last and the First, which she was writing at the time of her death. Regarded during her lifetime as one of the most original writers of fiction in England, Ivy Compton-Burnett attracted a small but devoted coterie of readers who followed her epigrammatic prose style with all the attention to nuance it required, accepted her anachronistic interest in late-Victorian English family life, and delighted in plot structures that were more often than not outrageously complex. Her novels lay bare various characters' efforts to attain and maintain power in the family, dissect the artificiality of the society they examine in an equally artificial...