A House and Its Head is a 1935 novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett, republished in 2001 by New York Review Books with an afterword by Francine Prose and in 2021 by Pushkin Press with an introduction by Hilary Mantel.

[1][2] The novel, which focuses on an upper-middle class Victorian household in the 1880s, explores themes such as family secrets and the subordination of women by men.

Duncan is tyrannical and overbearing; early on, he throws a science book by Grant, which he finds "immoral," into a fire.

Rebecca Abrams, writing in the New Statesman, ranked it among the publication's most important novels of the 20th century, comparing it to the work of Henry James.

[6] Hilary Mantel, writing in The Telegraph, called the book "the merriest tale of human depravity you will ever read.