If you feel you want bracing, rather than soothing, you might read or reread Ivy Compton-Burnett – if you enjoy her, there are 19 novels to go at. I first tried to read her when I was in my twenties and dropped back, baffled and a little repelled by her style. But ten years later I tried again and it was like arriving home. I hope that was because I had started writing myself, and admired the remorseless tick-tock of her dialogue – and not because I had become more like her grim and merciless characters. I have been reading her on a loop ever since.
I don’t mind which book I pick up. They are all the much the same: late Victorian family, usually multi-generational, meet at meals in a decaying country house; at breakfast, luncheon, tea and supper, they eviscerate each other. There will be one or more tyrants, one or more natural victims, a peacemaker, someone naive, someone sententious, and a few visiting gossips to stir the pot. There will be a chorus of servants, whose peevish and comic world is an inverted version of the one upstairs.
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