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Manservant and Maidservant

10 best books like Manservant and Maidservant (Ivy Compton-Burnett): The Chateau, Angel, The Rector's Daughter, Sour Sweet, The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, The Three Sisters, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel, Mr. Fortune's Maggot; and, The Salutation, The Good Companions

The Chateau
AuthorWilliam Maxwell
ISBN1860468144
This is a well-written (Maxwell doesn't write any other way) novel with a nostalgic feel (again, Maxwell doesn't seem to write any other way), with the longer first part (of two) reading almost like a travel diary at times; and just when you're wondering, near the end of that first part, what it might all...
Angel
AuthorElizabeth Taylor
ISBN1844083071
Writing stories that are extravagant and fanciful, fifteen-year old Angel retreats to a world of romance, escaping the drabness of provincial life. She knows she is different, that she is destined to become a feted authoress, owner of great riches and of Paradise House . . .

After reading The...
The Rector's Daughter
AuthorF.M. Mayor
ISBN0860689115
Dedmayne Rectory is quietly decaying, its striped chintz and darkened rooms are a bastion of outmoded Victorian values. Here Mary has spent thirty-five years, devoting herself to her sister, now dead, and to her father, Canon Jocelyn. Although she is pitied by her neighbours for this muted existence,...
Sour Sweet
AuthorTimothy Mo
ISBN0952419327
I have not read so many historic Booker nominees this year, but Timothy Mo has been on my radar for some time, so it was an easy decision to pick this one up. It was his second novel, and was shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize.

The story alternates between two groups of characters. On the one hand...
The Unrest-Cure and Other Stories
AuthorSaki
ISBN1590176243
The whimsical, macabre tales of British writer H. H. Munro—better known as Saki—deftly, mercilessly, and hilariously skewer the banality and hypocrisy of polite upper-class English society between the end of Queen Victoria’s reign and the beginning of World War I. Their heroes are clever,...
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
AuthorBrian Moore
ISBN0316579661
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is an unflinching and deeply sympathetic portrait of a woman destroyed by self and circumstance. First published in 1955, it marked Brian Moore as a major figure in English literature (he would go on to be short-listed three times for the Booker Prize) and established...
The Three Sisters
AuthorMay Sinclair
ISBN0860682439
Author, poet, critic, and suffragist Mary Amelia St. Clair was a contemporary of and acquainted with Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Ford Madox Ford, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Rebecca West, among others. She served as an ambulance driver in World War I, and produced poetry and fiction based on it. Her novel...
The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
AuthorGeorge Meredith
ISBN0140434836
Of all nineteenth-century English novels, " claims Edward Mendelson in his Introduction to this edition, "The Ordeal of Richard Feverel is the most self-consciously literary in its style and structure and the most sexually explicit in its plot and theme." First published in 1859, Meredith's first...
Mr. Fortune's Maggot; and, The Salutation
AuthorSylvia Townsend Warner
ISBN0940322838
After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned-minister sets his heart on serving a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens, his superior warns, are like children—immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune lights out...
The Good Companions
AuthorJ.B. Priestley
Probably the most popular of Priestley's novels, The Good Companions was an instant best-seller when it was first published in July 1929, and, while JBP came to feel its success subsequently overshadowed many more important works, the book has remained popular. It was his third novel and it is certainly...
The Sound of My Voice
AuthorRon Butlin
ISBN0862411262
Morris Magellan has a house in the suburbs, nice wife and kids. But Morris is also a chronic alcoholic, heading fast towards self-destruction. Morris is not hoping to meet Ms. Right and acquire the two kids that will straighten everything out. He already has all this and it hasn't kept him off the bottle....
I'll Go to Bed at Noon
AuthorGerard Woodward
ISBN0393328007
Colette Jones has had problems of her own with alcohol, but now it seems as though her whole family is in danger of turning to booze. Her oldest son, Janus, the family's golden boy, has wasted his talents as a concert pianist. His drinking sprees with his brother-in-law, Bill, a pseudo-Marxist supermarket...
A Married Man
AuthorPiers Paul Read
ISBN0380551039
John Strickland is a middle-aged barrister with a wife, Clare, and two children. Staying with his parents-in-law at their house in Norfolk, he reads Leo Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Illych, and this precipitates a mid-life crisis. What has happened to his youthful ideals to do good in the...
The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography
AuthorA.J.A. Symons
ISBN0940322617
One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel -- "a masterpiece"-- and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking...
The Mountain Lion
AuthorJean Stafford
ISBN0292751362
Coming of age in pre-World War II California and Colorado brings tragedy to Molly and Ralph Fawcett in Jean Stafford's classic semi-autobiographical novel, first published in 1947. Torn between their mother's world of genteel respectability and their grandfather's and uncle's world of cowboy...
School for Love
AuthorOlivia Manning
ISBN1590173031
Jerusalem in 1945 is a city in flux: refugees from the war in Europe fill its streets and cafés, the British colonial mandate is coming to an end, and tensions are on the rise between the Arab and Jewish populations. Felix Latimer, a recently orphaned teenager, arrives in Jerusalem from Baghdad, biding...
Corrigan
AuthorCaroline Blackwood
ISBN1590170067
Corrigan is at once a mordant comedy of manners and a very modern morality play. Since her husband's death, the increasingly frail Mrs. Blunt has had only her trips to his grave to look forward to. Her raucous housekeeper's conversation, and cooking, are best forgotten. Nadine, her daughter, is an infrequent,...
The Shrimp and the Anemone
AuthorL.P. Hartley
ISBN0571203825
Oh, L.P. Hartley, why are you forgotten?

This is the second Hartley book I've read (the first was The Go-Between), and if anything this one was even better. Both of the books take a double view, with a main character seeing things from childhood and the reader having access to what the adult world...
Alberta and Jacob
AuthorCora Sandel
ISBN0821407562
But a wound opened inside. Delight and melancholy welled up simultaneously from the depths of her mind. She could not understand why nor protect herself from them. They streamed over her together with the light, making her shrink with painful impatience. Tears came, God knows how. One moment she was...
The Three Paradoxes
AuthorPaul Hornschemeier
ISBN1560976535
The Three Paradoxes is an intricate and complex autobiographical comic by one of the most talented and innovative young cartoonists today. The story begins with a story inside the story: the cartoon character Paul Hornschemeier is trying to finish a story called "Paul and the Magic Pencil." Paul has...
A Legacy
AuthorSybille Bedford
ISBN0141188057
The Kaiser's Germany is the setting of Sybille Bedford's first and best-known novel, in which two families -- one from solid, upholstered Jewish Berlin, the other from the somnolent, agrarian Catholic South -- become comically, tragically, irrevocably intertwined. "Each family," writes the author,...
Death in Summer
AuthorWilliam Trevor
ISBN0140287825
A New York Times Bestseller and Notable Book
From the winner of the 1999 David Cohen British Literature Prize comes an unforgettably chilling novel, written with the compassion and artistry that define Trevor's fiction.
There were three deaths that summer. The first was Letitia's, sudden...
Blood on the Forge
AuthorWilliam Attaway
ISBN1590171349
This brutally gripping novel about the African-American Great Migration follows the three Moss brothers, who flee the rural South to work in industries up North. Delivered by day into the searing inferno of the steel mills, by night they encounter a world of surreal devastation, crowded with dogfighters,...
The Middle of the Journey
AuthorLionel Trilling
ISBN1590170156
Published in 1947, as the cold war was heating up, Lionel Trilling’s only novel was a prophetic reckoning with the bitter ideological disputes that were to come to a head in the McCarthy era. The Middle of the Journey revolves around a political turncoat and the anger his action awakens among a group...
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