"AESCHYLUS AND SOPHOCLES FUNNILY REINVENTED BY OSCAR WILDE"

COMPTON-BURNETT, Ivy. Brothers and Sisters. London: Heath Cranton, 1929. Octavo, original burgundy cloth, original dust jacket. $450.

First edition of the follow-up to Compton-Burnett's "Pastors and Masters," in original dust jacket.

"By the time Ivy Compton-Burnett came to be spoken of as 'the English Secret,' she had acquired a reputation as one of the most original writers of her time… Compton-Burnett was compared favorably to Jane Austen, Congreve, Aeschylus, Faulkner, Hemingway, and even Picasso. The book critic Cyril Connolly predicted that she would be the only contemporary writer to outlive the century; Raymond Mortimer, who as a young man reviewed her in Vogue early in her career, repeatedly praised her as a genius, 'the single most powerful force at work in the English novel in the generation following James Joyce and Virginia Woolf'… Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, and Henry Green—so clearly descend from her. Ivy Compton-Burnett's books will strike most American readers as quintessentially English: spare, decorticated, tightly constructed drawing-room comedies in which everyone (3-year-olds, 90-year-olds, butlers, governesses) speaks in finely honed language. They are unrelievedly arch, even campy, contrived dramas of domestic life in a fantasy England… Aeschylus and Sophocles funnily reinvented by Oscar Wilde" (New York Times).

Book fine, dust jacket near-fine with mild toning to spine. A handsome copy in scarce original dust jacket.