As another term begins at her girls' school, Josephine Napier reasserts her iron grip over her teachers and family. Her air of studied self-sacrifice conceals ruthless manipulation, but with the introduction of a male teacher to her staff and the return of an old rival for her husband's affections, the mask begins to slip. Old deceptions and new rivalries come to the surface, and the starched perfection of her life is threatened. A consummate expression of Ivy Compton-Burnett's unique style, full of viciously witty dialogue laced with double meanings and veiled insults, More Women Than Men is a masterful dissection of gender and power by an essential twentieth-century writer.

"She is as much part of our great twentieth-century fictional heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen... She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde" - Guardian

"Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life" - Daily Telegraph

"Absolutely sui generis... Her remorseless humor and savagery are a unique cocktail. There's no middle ground with this novelist-you're either bewildered by her or you become an addict" - BOMB

"A remarkable and unusual novelist, who has, in her own well-tilled field, no rival and no parallel" - TLS

"Darkly acerbic critiques" - Vogue

"It is almost certain that her powerful novels will gain in significance and be thought of, in time, as some of the finest writing of our century" - New York Times