Pastors and Masters

What is Pastors and Masters about?

Pastors and Masters (1925) is one of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s early novels, set in a small English boys’ school and the academic community surrounding it. The story revolves around two aging friends, Nicholas Herrick and Richard Bumpus, who run a school with genteel indifference to actual education. When a manuscript surfaces that may have been plagiarized, the discovery sets off a chain of revelations about intellectual dishonesty, emotional manipulation, and the comfortable hypocrisies that sustain social relationships. Compton-Burnett’s distinctive method—telling the story almost entirely through dialogue—is already fully developed, creating an effect that is simultaneously comic and disturbing. Her characters speak in witty, epigrammatic sentences that reveal depths of selfishness, vanity, and moral compromise beneath polite surfaces. The novel satirizes academic pretension and the gap between intellectual aspiration and actual behavior. Though shorter and more concentrated than her later masterpieces, Pastors and Masters demonstrates the qualities that would make Compton-Burnett one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century English fiction.