Ivy Compton-Burnett
-
Standard Name: Compton-Burnett, Ivy
Birth Name: Ivy Compton-Burnett
ICB
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.
Connections
Connections | Author name Sort descending | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Friends, Associates | Anna Kavan | After her relationship with Stuart Edmonds ended, AK
developed a large and close circle of friends who doted on her. Her friends were almost exclusively homosexual men, and she developed a reputation for not getting... |
Theme or Topic Treated in Text | Sheila Kaye-Smith | She writes at length about her favoured religious authors. As to intellectual novels of the twentieth century, she describes late conversion to enjoyment of Ivy Compton-Burnett
once she accepted her art as abstract: not pictures... |
Theme or Topic Treated in Text | Margaret Kennedy | Here Kennedy argues that entertainment and enjoyment are valuable aims for the novel. She maintains that the novelist is, in essence, a storyteller, but the storyteller-novelist has been excluded by a literary society that devalues... |
Textual Features | Rosamond Lehmann | They published some distinguished names—including Edith Sitwell
, Rose Macaulay
, and Ivy Compton-Burnett
—and some promising newcomers, including Margaret Lane
, Margiad Evans
, and Jean Howard
. Hastings, Selina. Rosamond Lehmann. Chatto and Windus. 240-1 |
Literary responses | Ada Leverson | This novel was widely praised when it appeared. The Daily Mail reviewer, however, dismissed it as the typically inferior product of a lady writer, comparing it to its disadvantage with Dolores, first (and now... |
Textual Production | Penelope Lively | PL
has published introductions to works by other writers including Ivy Compton-Burnett
, Edith Wharton
, Willa Cather
, and Carol Shields
. In September 2015 she reviewed Alison Light
's Common People: In Pursuit... |
Friends, Associates | Rose Macaulay | RM
met Ivy Compton-Burnett
; they immediately became true and intimate friends, and the friendship lasted for life. Emery, Jane. Rose Macaulay: A Writer’s Life. John Murray. 220-1 |
Friends, Associates | Rose Macaulay | RM
also regularly attended the gatherings of the Friday Hampstead Circle
, presided over by Dorothy
and Reeve Brooke
and later by Sylvia
and Robert Lynd
. These gatherings were attended by RM
's friends... |
Friends, Associates | Cecily Mackworth | Other friendships made now or later included many with distinguished women, like Ivy Compton-Burnett
(whom she found kinder to me than she apparently was to most other people), Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet. 112 |
Textual Production | Cecily Mackworth | When Nathalie Sarraute
argued that the novel is a dead form,CM
thought of three examples to prove her wrong: Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
's La Princesse de Clèves, Samuel Richardson
's Clarissa, and... |
Dedications | Olivia Manning | OM
published the middle volume of her Balkan Trilogy: The Spoilt City, dedicated to Ivy Compton-Burnett
. David, Deirdre. Olivia Manning: A Woman at War. Oxford University Press. 169n38 British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo. |
Friends, Associates | Olivia Manning | OM
's friends included a number of fellow-writers: William Gerhardi
, Ivy Compton-Burnett
(whom she had first met before the war, at a party given by Rose Macaulay
, and whose work she deeply admired),... |
Literary responses | Olivia Manning | This book evoked a double-edged response from Ivy Compton-Burnett
who, writing to Elizabeth Taylor
, said: It really is full of very good descriptions. Quite excellent descriptions. I don't know if you care for descriptions... |
Reception | Flora Macdonald Mayor | The novel established FMM
's reputation for precise use of prose, “The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive. 60741 (4 October 1980): 8 Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists, Macmillan. 45 |
Author summary | Barbara Pym | BP
was a distinguished, understatedly comic novelist of the twentieth century, whose autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, and notebooks) were published only after her death. Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press. 1-2, 9 Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, p. various pages. xiii-xiv |
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
No bibliographical results available.