More Women Than Men by I. Compton-Burnett (1933)

This is the first Compton-Burnett that I have enjoyed with out-and-out relish. There is the sense in this one that she's attacked the jugular just that little bit more firmly and assuredly. I think I also like the fact that it isn't set strictly in a family environment, rather in that of a girls' school. Josephine Napier is the headmistress. She has very strong and complicated relationships with her team of mistresses and the occasional master. She also has her gay brother's son living with her as an adoptee, and receives regular visits from that brother and his younger waspish partner. Erupting into the scene are an old friend who has also been a rival in love and her young daughter. The author's torturous attitude to conversation and interrelation and what they bring out in people, as well as what they don't, or what they just hint at, takes all this up in a whirlwind of words, depositing some things along the way, keeping others stirred thoroughly, and consistently re-arranging both the overt and the covert angles of each character toward the others. Fascinatingly, there is a point reached in all these jealousies, seeming altruisms, polite allowings, barbed vicious comments and tangled grips of power-play where a simple, physical, frightening fact is shown up, causing a death, witnessed by only two of them, which ripples a tiny bit in the ensuing couple of pages, and then is never mentioned again. Such is the Compton-Burnett insistence on the implied that one is consistently wondering whether one or other of them will bring it up veiledly, or be called to account by the other by implication, or will refer obliquely to it whilst discussing another matter. But they never do. Which is like life, I guess. These people are generally not like life, they are much too accentuated, which has been a sticking point for me in the past, but I have to admit that this time I cared a lot less, because there was something viscerally entertaining in all this lather of contest.