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 Sort ascending Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Pamela Hansford Johnson
PHJ includes among her topics Edith Sitwell , Shakespeare , Ivy Compton-Burnett , and Proust : these are taken up not in formal critique, but in statements of what each meant to her. She writes...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Muriel Jaeger
This book is sometimes called a memoir, but its autobiographical moments are only incidental. MJ 's attention is mostly directed towards books and reading; her own experiences of writing, publishing, and having her works performed...
Textual Production Pamela Hansford Johnson
In late 1951 she wrote a booklet for the British CouncilWriters and their Work series on Ivy Compton-Burnett , who was only just beginning to attract attention among those interested in the craft of...
Textual Production Elizabeth Taylor
Robert Liddell preserved the letters that ET wrote him from 1953 onwards. In his book he quotes up to five pages of detailed accounts of visits to Ivy Compton-Burnett .
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...
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...
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
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
received good reviews, and very nearly won the Polignac Prize.
Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists, Macmillan.
45
FMM was judged sensitive yet detached, firm and...
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
Reception Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Reception Samuel Beckett
Novelist Elizabeth Taylor boldly took her older friend Ivy Compton-Burnett to this play, and was rewarded with Compton-Burnett's pronouncement, Not a play to miss.
Liddell, Robert, and Francis King. Elizabeth and Ivy. Peter Owen.
96
For her part Taylor thought it as much as one...
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
Having achieved moderate success during her early career...
Occupation Edith Sitwell
It was well attended by women writers. Ivy Compton-Burnett and Bryher were there, and H. D. and Vita Sackville-West were among the other readers on the evening's programme. Dorothy Wellesley was to have read also...

Timeline

1826: The Royal Society of Literature received...

Writing climate item

1826

The Royal Society of Literature received its charter; it had been founded several years previously.

9 December 2006-17 July 2007: The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted...

Writing climate item

9 December 2006-17 July 2007

The National Portrait Gallery in London mounted an exhibition of photographs of women writers, mostly novelists, from 1920 to 1960.

Texts

Compton-Burnett, Ivy. A Family and a Fortune. Gollancz, 1939.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. A Father and His Fate. Gollancz, 1957.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. A God and His Gifts. Gollancz, 1963.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. A Heritage and Its History. Gollancz, 1959.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. A House and Its Head. Heinemann, 1935.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Brothers and Sisters. Heath Cranton, 1929.
Burkhart, Charles, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. “Critical Epilogue”. The Last and the First, Gollancz, 1971, pp. 151-9.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Darkness and Day. Gollancz, 1951.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Daughters and Sons. Gollancz, 1937.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Dolores. W. Blackwood and Sons, 1911.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Elders and Betters. Gollancz, 1944.
Sprigge, Elizabeth, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. “Foreword”. The Last and the First, Gollancz, 1971, pp. 7-12.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Manservant and Maidservant. Victor Gollancz, 1947.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Men and Wives. Heinemann, 1931.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. More Women than Men. William Heinemann, 1933.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Mother and Son. Gollancz, 1955.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Parents and Children. Gollancz, 1941.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Pastors and Masters. Heath Cranton, 1925.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy et al. The Last and the First. Gollancz, 1971.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. The Mighty and Their Fall. Gollancz, 1961.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. The Present and the Past. Gollancz, 1953.
Compton-Burnett, Ivy. Two Worlds and Their Ways. Gollancz, 1949.