Ivy Compton-Burnett

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Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE (5 June 1884 – 27 August 1969) was an English novelist, published (in the original hardback editions, ultimately by Gollancz) as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Mother and Son.

The daughter of a well-known homeopathic doctor, Compton-Burnett (pronounced 'Cumpton-Burnit') grew up in Hove and London. Her father had twelve children by two wives and Ivy's mother (the second wife) sent all her stepchildren away to boarding school as soon as possible.

In the author biography of the old Penguin editions of her novels there was a paragraph written by Compton-Burnett herself:

I have had such an uneventful life that there is little information to give. I was educated with my brothers in the country as a child, and later went to Holloway College, and took a degree in Classics. I lived with my family when I was quite young but for most of my life have had my own flat in London. I see a good deal of a good many friends, not all of them writing people. And there is really no more to say.

This omits the fact that her favourite brother, Guy, died of pneumonia; another, Noel, was killed on the Somme, and two sisters died in a suicide pact on Christmas Day. Not one of the twelve siblings had children, and all eight girls remained unmarried.

Compton-Burnett spent much of her own life as companion to Margaret Jourdain (died 1951), a leading authority on the decorative arts and the history of furniture, who shared the author's Kensington flat from 1919. For the first ten years, Compton-Burnett seems to have remained unobtrusively in the background, always severely dressed in black, a sort of governess figure. When Pastors and Masters appeared in 1925, Jourdain claimed to have been unaware that her friend was writing a novel.

Apart from Dolores (1911), a traditional novel she later rejected as something "one wrote as a girl", Compton-Burnett's fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem Edwardian. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another. Starting with Pastors and Masters (1925), Compton-Burnett developed a highly individualistic style. Her fiction relies heavily on dialogue and demands constant attention on the reader's part: there are instances in her work where important information is casually mentioned in a half sentence.

Her punctuation is deliberately bare: there are no colons or semi-colons, no exclamation marks, nor italics.

Of Pastors and Masters, the New Statesman wrote, "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius."

In her essay collection L'Ère du soupçon (1956), an early manifesto for the French nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute hails Compton-Burnett as an "one of the greatest novelists England has ever had".

[edit] Complete bibliography

Most of her novels are out of print.

[edit] Further reading

  • Hilary Spurling: Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett (1995) (combines two separate volumes originally published in 1974 and 1984) (ISBN 978-1860660269).
  • Frederick R. Karl: "The Intimate World of Ivy Compton-Burnett", A Reader's Guide to the Contemporary English Novel (1961) 201-219.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Compton-Burnett"
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