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"I can't be parted longer from my sons.... I am returning to my home." Nine years after her divorce from Cassius Clare, Catherine determines to re-enter his life. Her decision causes a remarkable upheaval in the Clare family and its own implications are analysed and redefined, not only in the drawing-room, but in the children's nursery and the servants' quarters. At first, Flavia, Cassius's second partner, feels resentment, fearing that she may be usurped. But as a camaraderie develops between your two women, it is Cassius who's excluded and whose self-pity intensifies, erupting in a stunning, unforeseen way.... Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was a modern-day of Virginia Woolf, who had written in her journal of how her own writing was "much inferior compared to the bitter truth and powerful originality of Miss Compton-Burnett." Ivy Compton Burnett's own tragic encounters of family life provided a few of the material drew on as a novelist. Her literature are about money, vitality, status, incest, adultery, murder, homosexuality, about which she was years ahead of her time, and everything the passions and stresses of family life, explained with fantastic wit and conception.
