Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, (; 5 June 188427 August 1969) was an English

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living writing novels and other fiction, while others asp ...

, published in the original editions as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955

James Tait Black Memorial Prize The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, Uni ...

for her novel ''Mother and Son''. Her works consist mainly of dialogue and focus on family life among the late Victorian or Edwardian upper middle class.

Background

Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in

Pinner Pinner is a London suburb in the London borough of Harrow, Greater London, England, northwest of Charing Cross, close to the border with Hillingdon, historically in the county of Middlesex. The population was 31,130 in 2011. Originally a med ...

Middlesex Middlesex (; abbreviation: Middx) is a historic county in southeast England. Its area is almost entirely within the wider urbanised area of London and mostly within the ceremonial county of Greater London, with small sections in neighbour ...

, on 5 June 1884, as the seventh of twelve children of a well-known

homeopathic Homeopathy or homoeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine. It was conceived in 1796 by the German physician Samuel Hahnemann. Its practitioners, called homeopaths, believe that a substance that causes symptoms of a dise ...

physician and prolific medical author, Dr James Compton-Burnett (the names were hyphenated and pronounced 'Cumpton-Burnit', 1840–1901) by his second wife, Katharine (1855–1911), daughter of civil engineer, surveyor and architect (many of the best houses built n Doverbetween 1850 and 1860 were his") Rowland Rees, who was also Mayor of Dover. Given the subjects of most of her works, it was widely assumed that the Compton-Burnett family were landed gentry; in his review of the final volume of Hilary Spurling's biography, J. I. M. Stewart wrote: "this persuasion she did nothing to controvert... when her ardent admirer and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not many generations back, and Mrs Spurling thinks that Ivy must have been about thirty before seeing the inside of an English country house." According to Spurling, "Ivy's... friends in later life generally assumed that she came, as the families do in her books, of a long line of country squires." In fact "she had moved with her family four times before she was 14, living on housing estates or in brand new suburban developments, hearing practically nothing about her Compton Burnett relations." The Compton-Burnett family in fact descended from small tenant farmers of Gavelacre Farm, near Winchester,

Hampshire Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in western South East England on the coast of the English Channel. Home to two major English cities on its south coast, Southampton and Portsmouth, Hampshire ...

(who despite owning no land called themselves "yeomen"), pretended since the time of Ivy's grandfather Charles to be descended from the younger branch of the landowning Scottish Burnett (also Burnet) family through Alexander Burnett, 12th Laird of Leys, his son, judge

Robert Burnet, Lord Crimond Robert Burnet, Lord Crimond (1592 – 24 August 1661Dalrymple of Hailes, p. 373) was a Scottish advocate and judge. Background He was the fourth son of Alexander Burnett of Leys by his wife Katherine, daughter of Alexander Gordon of Lesmoir, a ...

, and his grandson Gilbert Burnet,

Bishop of Salisbury The Bishop of Salisbury is the ordinary of the Church of England's Diocese of Salisbury in the Province of Canterbury. The diocese covers much of the counties of Wiltshire and Dorset. The see is in the City of Salisbury where the bishop's seat ...

from 1689 to 1715. This claim "was unquestioningly accepted by Charles's descendants, and the whole affair passed... rapidly into family legend."J. H. Clarke: ''Life and Work of James Compton Burnett, M. D., with an account of the Burnett Memorial'', Homeopathic Publishing Company (on behalf of the Burnett Memorial Committee), 1904, pp. 4–5. This claim is repeated in Elizabeth Sprigge's ''The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett''; it was the later biography by Hilary Spurling (in which she notes the "many misleading claims... made for I. Compton-Burnett's family tree") that meticulously traces the family. J. Bhagyalakshmi, in ''Ivy Compton-Burnett and her Art'' (1986) reflects that the former was "a friend's memoir", as opposed to Spurling having taken "pains of a scholar" in compiling her biography. James Compton-Burnett's father, Charles, was an itinerant farm labourer – among other places at Redlynch, near Salisbury, where his son was born – who later settled at French Street, in a poor area of Southampton, and went into business as a corn and coal dealer, later living at Millbrook, outside Southampton, and working as a dairyman. (Before Spurling's research, it had been claimed that he was "a considerable landowner" at Redlynch, but the Compton-Burnetts of Charles's generation were in fact working-class labourers and grocers, and despite their claims over several generations of yeoman status, the Compton-Burnett family never owned any land. The "Compton" name had been used since the 1803 marriage of James Compton-Burnett's grandfather, Richard Burnett, to a Catherine Maria Compton, of Hampshire, allegedly in honour of her "large fortune"; in fact, she was daughter of a blacksmith, who loaned his son-in-law £300. Richard's younger brother William would marry Catherine's sister, Anne; many of the children of both marriages bore the name "Compton". Ivy Compton-Burnett's first cousin was Margery Blackie, a homeopathic physician. 20 The Drive, Hove

Ivy grew up in

Hove Hove is a seaside resort and one of the two main parts of the city of Brighton and Hove, along with Brighton in East Sussex, England. Originally a "small but ancient fishing village" surrounded by open farmland, it grew rapidly in the 19th c ...

and

London London is the capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary dow ...

. She was educated at home with two brothers until the age of 14. She attended Addiscombe College, Hove, in 1898–1901, then boarded for two terms in 1901–1902 at Howard College, Bedford, before embarking on a university degree in Classics at

Royal Holloway College, University of London Royal Holloway, University of London (RHUL), formally incorporated as Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, is a public university, public research university and a constituent college of the federal University of London. It has six schools, ...

. After graduating she in turn tutored four younger sisters at home.Patrick Lyons
"Burnett, Dame Ivy Compton- (1884–1969)"
ODNB entry. Retrieved 9 July 2014. Ivy's mother sent all her stepchildren away to boarding-school as soon as possible. According to the scholar Patrick Lyons, "In widowhood Compton-Burnett's mother provided her with an early model for the line of outrageous domestic bullies that appear in her novels, anticipating the grief-stricken and over-demanding Sophia Stace (''Brothers and Sisters'', 1929) and the more shamelessly lucid Harriet Haslem (''Men and Wives'', 1931), who declares candidly: "I see my children's faces, and am urged by the hurt in them to go further, and driven on to the worse." Four of Ivy's sisters rebelled against home life in 1915 and moved up to London to live in a flat with the pianist

Myra Hess Dame Julia Myra Hess, (25 February 1890 – 25 November 1965) was an English pianist best known for her performances of the works of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. Career Early life Julia Myra Hess was born on 25 February 1890 to a J ...

. Ivy successfully managed the family trust, consisting of both parents' estates and largely taking the form of tenanted property, after her mother's death. In the author blurb of the early Penguin editions of her novels there was a paragraph written by Compton-Burnett herself: "I have had such an uneventful life that there is little information to give. I was educated with my brothers in the country as a child, and later went to Holloway College, and took a degree in Classics. I lived with my family when I was quite young but for most of my life have had my own flat in London. I see a good deal of a good many friends, not all of them writing people. And there is really no more to say." This omits the facts that her favourite brother, Guy, died of

pneumonia Pneumonia is an inflammatory condition of the lung primarily affecting the small air sacs known as alveoli. Symptoms typically include some combination of productive or dry cough, chest pain, fever, and difficulty breathing. The severi ...

; another, Noel, was killed on the Somme, and her two youngest sisters, Stephanie Primrose and Catharine (called "Baby" and "Topsy"), died in a suicide pact by taking

veronal Barbital (or barbitone), marketed under the brand names Veronal for the pure acid and Medinal for the sodium salt, was the first commercially available barbiturate. It was used as a sleeping aid (hypnotic) from 1903 until the mid-1950s. The chemic ...

in their locked bedroom on

Christmas Day Christmas is an annual festival commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ, observed primarily on December 25 as a religious and cultural celebration among billions of people around the world. A feast central to the Christian liturgical year, ...

, 1917. Not one of the twelve siblings had children, and all eight girls remained unmarried.

Companion

Compton-Burnett spent much of her life as a companion to

Margaret Jourdain Margaret Jourdain (15 August 1876 – 6 April 1951) was a prominent writer on English furniture and decoration. She began her career ghost-writing as Francis Lenygon for the firm of Lenygon & Morant, dealers in furnishings with a royal appointme ...

(1876–1951), a leading authority and writer on the

decorative arts ] The decorative arts are arts or crafts whose object is the design and manufacture of objects that are both beautiful and functional. It includes most of the arts making objects for the interiors of buildings, and interior design, but not usual ...

and the history of furniture, who shared the author's Kensington flat from 1919. For the first ten years, Compton-Burnett seems to have remained unobtrusively in the background, always severely dressed in black. When ''Pastors and Masters'' appeared in 1925, Jourdain said she had been unaware that her friend was writing a novel. After Jourdain's death in 1951 Compton-Burnett was likely in a relationship with Madge Garland, former British ''Vogue'' editor and founder of the School of Fashion at the

Royal College of Art The Royal College of Art (RCA) is a public research university in London, United Kingdom, with campuses in South Kensington, Battersea and White City. It is the only entirely postgraduate art and design university in the United Kingdom. It o ...

. Garland described this as "one of the happiest things in a long and troubled life" and Compton-Burnett was "besotted with Madge". They took trips and holidays together until Compton-Burnett's death. Garland is considered to have been a lesbian by her biographer Lisa Cohen, though her private life was often veiled due to her position in society.

Honours

Compton-Burnett was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1967.

Death

Ivy Compton-Burnett held no religious beliefs; she was a "fierce Victorian atheist". She died at her Kensington home on 27 August 1969 and was cremated at Putney Vale Crematorium.

Work

Apart from ''Dolores'' ( 1911), a traditional novel she later rejected as something "one wrote as a girl", Compton-Burnett's fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem

Edwardian The Edwardian era or Edwardian period of British history spanned the reign of King Edward VII, 1901 to 1910 and is sometimes extended to the start of the First World War. The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 marked the end of the Victori ...

. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another, with parents struggling with children, or sibling rivalries producing malicious, if covert, power struggles.D. Daiches (ed.), ''The Penguin Companion to Literature 1'' (1971) p. 114. Starting with '' Pastors and Masters'' (

1925 Events January * January 1 ** The Syrian Federation is officially dissolved, the State of Aleppo and the State of Damascus having been replaced by the State of Syria. * January 3 – Benito Mussolini makes a pivotal speech in the Itali ...

), Compton-Burnett developed a highly individualistic style. Her fiction relies heavily on formal dialogue (in strong contrast to the often melodramatic plots), and demands constant attention on the reader's part: there are instances in her work where important information is casually mentioned in a half sentence, and her use of punctuation is deliberately perfunctory. The result is to create a deliberately claustrophobic fictional world, dominated by the psychological exploration of small-scale power-abuse and persecution.

Critical reception

There has been longstanding appreciation of Compton-Burnett's novels. Of '' Pastors and Masters'' the ''

New Statesman The ''New Statesman'' is a British Political magazine, political and cultural magazine published in London. Founded as a weekly review of politics and literature on 12 April 1913, it was at first connected with Sidney Webb, Sidney and Beatrice ...

'' wrote: "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius."Quoted in In her essay collection ''L'Ère du soupçon'' (1956), an early manifesto for the French '' nouveau roman'',

Nathalie Sarraute Nathalie Sarraute (; born Natalia Ilinichna Tcherniak ( rus, Ната́лья Ильи́нична Черня́к); – 19 October 1999) was a French writer and lawyer. Personal life Sarraute was born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk (now Ivanovo), 300&n ...

hails Compton-Burnett as "one of the greatest novelists England has ever had."

Elizabeth Bowen Elizabeth Bowen CBE (; 7 June 1899 – 22 February 1973) was an Irish-British novelist and short story writer notable for her books about the "big house" of Irish landed Protestants as well her fiction about life in wartime London. Life ...

said of the wartime ''Parents and Children'', "To read in these days a page of Compton-Burnett dialogue is to think of the sound of glass being swept up, one of these London mornings after a blitz." Patrick Lyons wrote over 30 years later, "These are witty and often demanding novels, peopled with alert sceptics who are devoted to epigrammatic talk and edgily precise analysis of talk."

Bibliography

*Published in the United States as ''Bullivant and the Lambs''. There has been a recovery of UK and US interest in Compton-Burnett's novels in the 2000s.Ten out of the twenty were available or shortly to be available again in the UK in printed form at end May 2012: ''Pastors and Masters'', ''Men and Wives'', ''A House and Its Head'', ''A Family and a Fortune'', ''Parents and Children'', ''Elders and Betters'', ''Manservant and Maidservant'', ''Two Worlds and Their Ways'', ''The Present and the Past'', and ''The Last and the First'' – collated results from The Book Depository
retrieved 31 May 2012
and Amazon UK
retrieved 31 May 2012
Some others were available in electronic editions. There were several translations into French, Italian, Spanish and other languages.

References

External links

The Ivy Compton-Burnett Home Page
* ttps://www.myspace.com/ivycomptonburnett Ivy Compton-Burnett at MySpacebr>Women of Brighton
Recordings of works by or about Ivy Compton-Burnett {{DEFAULTSORT:Compton-Burnett, Ivy 1884 births 1969 deaths Alumni of Royal Holloway, University of London Burials at Putney Vale Cemetery Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire English women novelists James Tait Black Memorial Prize recipients People from Pinner People from Hove English atheists Deaths from bronchitis 20th-century English novelists 20th-century British women writers