Ivy Compton-Burnett

05 June 1884 - 27 August 1969

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.

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Connections

Connections	Author name Sort descending	Excerpt
Cultural formation	Barbara Pym	As for marriage, BP 's involvements with men as a student must have been to some extent influenced by social pressure to marry. She felt badly let down when Henry Harvey decided to wed another...
Friends, Associates	Barbara Pym	BP wrote steadily throughout her life, regardless of changes in occupation. One of the benefits of her first publication, Some Tame Gazelle, in 1950 was the introduction of various authors into her personal and...
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...
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...
Occupation	Muriel Spark	She later implied that she got this job on the strength of sharing her enthusiasm for Ivy Compton-Burnett with a woman at the local Employment Bureau . She described the work as wonderfully interesting. I...
Intertextuality and Influence	Muriel Spark	The story takes place at Geneva in Switzerland (transferred from the Italian scene of the real-llife original), on an estate owned by a Baron Klopstock, among characters of diverse national origins. The protagonist, Lister the...
Literary responses	Muriel Spark	Ivy Compton-Burnett , who always disliked religious sentiment and religious writing, was severe on MS . She described her early novels as Not at all good. . . . I don't like novels that tell...
Occupation	Freya Stark	FS expressed a strong admiration for Jourdain and her intellectual accomplishments: in letters to her mother, she outlined plans for a writing career on the model of Jourdain's. Stark met Jourdain's partner, Ivy Compton-Burnett ...
Literary responses	Christina Stead	CS now received her first enthusiastic review from the Times Literary Supplement—and the first to be written by a woman, Marigold Johnson . Johnson mentioned that [d]istinguished American writers had been extravagant in their...
Occupation	Elizabeth Taylor	ET wrote amusingly of the horror of appearing on a television programme about books, filmed at Birmingham: sitting on spindly chairs under dazzling lights with other participants (Angus Wilson , whom she liked...
Literary responses	Elizabeth Taylor	Julia Strachey and Pamela Hansford Johnson both slammed A Wreath of Roses. Beauman, Nicola. The Other Elizabeth Taylor. Persephone Books. 214-15 ET herself felt that it expanded her range, but that the result was not successful: that she had produced a cold...
Literary responses	Elizabeth Taylor	Ivy Compton-Burnett wrote to her friend ET of her great and lasting pleasure in this novel. Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton. 270 The Book Marketing Council included it on its list of Best Novels of Our Time. Nevertheless most...
Literary responses	Elizabeth Taylor	This novel too was praised by Ivy Compton-Burnett . Spurling, Hilary. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart. Hodder and Stoughton. 284 Kingsley Amis , in a retrospective essay on ET 's career, noticed her ability to combine an often withering disgust for hypocrisy and self-delusion with...
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 .
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...

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