Manservant and Maidservant

Manservant and Maidservant  

1st edition
Author(s) Ivy Compton-Burnett
Publisher Victor Gollancz
Publication date 1947

Manservant and Maidservant is a 1947 novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. It was published in the United States with the title Bullivant and the Lambs.[1]

Whenever the author 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 [with Horace's cousin]. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with his sometime slaves? What compensation, or consolation, can there be for the wrongs that have been done?” — from the back cover of the NYRB Classics edition, 2001.

References

  1. ^ Book Review of 1st US edition, Alfred Knopf, 1948 (19 July 1948). "The Autocrat at the Tea Table". Time. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,798911,00.html. "By the end of Bullivant and the Lambs, what seemed at first to be merely an assembly of oldfashioned, improbable types has been changed by mysterious artistry into a vitally authentic household."