Too much bickering, funny for a while but rather annoying after about 100 pages of it. The style is entertaining but the story line is just too slow to carry the myriad of bitter comments about each other. ( )

Persevered with the dialogue halfway through the book, not finding any wit or pleasure. That's enough. ( )

Spoilers could occur. What an odd book. I read the 2 together but I"m entering them separately. I would have said oh yes, I like Ivy Compton Burnett, she's a great writer...but I don't remember whatever else I read by her being this weird. It isn't all dialogue, but it is a lot of dialogue, and there is a lot of exposition in the dialogue & I don't know if I really believe people say those things. I guess in the end she drew the picture of some people as they actually might be, and not condensed or refined into a few characteristics, and not all good or all bad. But this sad sad family, with the kids still all living at home, and the women with the straitened lives, and the horrible things they say to each other (or think). The original family is man wife, 2 grown sons, 1 younger son, and a grown daughter, all living together along with the husband's brother who, I guess, also loved the wife. Along comes wife's sister & father to rent the gatehouse and complain and complain. Husband's brother becomes engaged to lovely friend of wife's sister. Husband's brother inherits a bunch of money. Wife dies. Husband marries lovely woman, brother gets p.o.'ed but in the end everybody makes up & everybody's life is made better by the money. I don't know. Husband's brother somehow gives his all & everything to the family.

This is a well-crafted novel from the nineteenth century telling the story of a family and a fortune - go figure.

"Ivy Compton-Burnett's unique genius lay in her ability to convey, using the delicate undertones of drawing-room conversation, the major experiences of life and the intrinsic emotions of the heart. In A Family and a Fortune, through the central characters of Edgar Gaveston, his selfless younger brother Dudley, and the embittered Matilda Seaton, she examines the bizarre and terrible effects of death and inheritance."

— from the back cover of the Penguin Modern Classics edition, 1983 ( )