A House and its Head by I. Compton-Burnett (1935)

This starts like many of her others. One is trapped under a too-tight bedspread, locked into a Victorian family's bitter, swiping atmosphere under a patriarch who is all-outdoing: "you may have an objection, or a comment; I know that you have no right to either, and don't know yourself sufficiently well to be able to make it. I know you far better, and understand that this attempting to comment or object is just a function of your needlessness" is how I'd put it, summing up Compton-Burnett's lead character here, Duncan Edgeworth. This feels surprisingly like a retread of previous efforts for the first half of this book - for the first time reading this author a slight sense of boredom overcame me. His daughters are struggling under him, as is his tired wife, and an orphaned male cousin who lives with the family. The people of their very tight village are similarly caught in the web of Duncan's all-requiring hyperattention (and a few other toxic webs of their own). But of course, the author, in her usual way, has them all react in ways in which they attempt to gain liberation - bitching, contesting, attempting to intimidate each other as well as him. Very few of these attempts succeed, because most of these people are extraordinarily hardy, necessarily so, in these super-accentuated circumstances. These stymied mutual harrowings, though now familiar, are still entertaining, and as usual expressed in terms of profound politeness on the whole, though occasionally they have a startling directness, just to mix things up. The veiled fight travels through a lot of plot: the wearing-down death of his wife; the surprise selection of a new young one; the birth of a son; the discovery of the new wife's mutiny with the orphaned cousin of which the son is the result; her banishment; the taking on of a third wife, an older woman who has lived with the family as governess and help for most of the daughters' lives; her pregnancy; the gas-death of the first son in sinister circumstances; the suspicion that Duncan and his third wife may have done away with the boy, who, after all, was not either of their child, in order to guarantee succession rights to their as yet unborn one; the marriage of the orphaned cousin and the youngest daughter; the extraordinary revelation, to us as readers, but otherwise only between a tough village matriarch and this youngest daughter, that the youngest daughter has conspired with a disaffected maid in the murder of the boy; Duncan is in the room when this revelation is embarked upon - has he heard?; the splitting of the youngest daughter and the orphaned cousin's marriage because of a lesser misdemeanour of hers; its eventual reconstitution for monetary reasons only with the family all coming together again under one roof. And everyone lived happily ever after! By the time this astonishing ground is traversed in the second half, Compton-Burnett has gripped the reader thoroughly, completely re-establishing her power of compulsion in the mind.