Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett

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Compton-Burnett, Dame Ivy (1884–1969), novelist. Her highly condensed and abstracted novels were composed almost entirely in dialogue. They are all dated round about the turn of the century and set in large, gloomy, generally dilapidated houses full of servants, children, and dependent relatives. Each family is ruled in almost complete isolation from the outside world by a more or less tyrannical parent or grandparent: hence the consistently high rate of domestic crime ranging from adultery, incest, and child abuse to murder and fraud. Her inward-looking, self-contained, and heavily monitored high Victorian households provided her with an ideal environment in which to examine the misuse of power together with the violence and misery that follow. Her chief formative influences were G. Eliot, the Greek tragic dramatists, and S. Butler. She embarked on a serious career as a writer in 1925 with Pastors and Masters. Many more novels followed, including Brother and Sisters (1929) and More Women Than Men (1933). Her most outstanding are perhaps A House and Its Head (1935), A Family and a Fortune (1939), and Manservant and Maidservant (1947). Her achievement has been well summed up by A. Wilson: ‘In the age of the concentration camp, when, from 1935 or so to 1947, she wrote her very best novels, no writer did more to illuminate the springs of human cruelty, suffering and bravery.’