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.
Black-and-white close-up photograph, circa 1957, of Ivy Compton-Burnett looking off-camera.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
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...

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