Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Ivy Compton-Burnett
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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.
Hastings, Selina. Rosamond Lehmann. Chatto and Windus.
240-1
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
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Pamela Hansford Johnson
Friends made in New York included PHJ
's publisher Charles Scribner
, as well as Diana
and Lionel Trillingwhom I loved, but always found a little intimidating.
Johnson, Pamela Hansford. Important to Me. Macmillan; Scribner.
45
At home her literary friends included...
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...
Literary responses
Pamela Hansford Johnson
In a letter Compton-Burnett
reported herself grateful . . . in a way to her critic (whose name she got wrong) but felt she had made errors which needed to be pointed out. Damningly she...
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...
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...
GG
also worked as director for two different London publishing houses: for Eyre and Spottiswoode
from 1944 (when he resigned from the secret service) to 1948 and for Bodley Head
for ten years beginning in...
