According to the scholar Patrick Lyons, "In widowhood Compton-Burnett's mother provided her with an early model for the line of outrageous domestic bullies that appear in her novels, anticipating the grief-stricken and over-demanding Sophia Stace ("Brothers and Sisters", 1929) and the more shamelessly lucid Harriet Haslem ("Men and Wives", 1931), who declares candidly: "I see my children's faces, and am urged by the hurt in them to go further, and driven on to the worse."