Ivy Compton-Burnett published twenty novels: the first while she was in her twenties, in 1911, but the first one to use her mature and startlingly original style when she was forty, in 1925. From the beginning she was praised by critics (sometimes a chorus, sometimes a few lone voices) but sold less well than she would have liked. She was a paradox: a person shaped by Victorian values and social hierarchies, whose novels—composed largely of razor-sharp dialogue—dismantle those values and hierarchies from within.
Milestones
5 June 1884 ICB was born in a substantial house in a newly-developed suburban estate at
Pinner,
Middlesex.
By 23 September 1907 ICB wrote a poem for her next sister, Vera, on her sixteenth birthday.
27 August 1969 ICB died, after some months of being cared for, protected, bullied, and often denied to visitors, by her maid, Mary.
1971 ICB's final, untitled novel (which cost her much time and trouble) was published posthumously under the title
The Last and the First.
