Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > English Literature, 20th cent. to the Present: Biographies

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.’

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett , 1892-1969, English novelist. Educated at the Univ. of London, she lived quietly in London for most of her life. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1967. Ivy Compton-Burnett's unconventional novels of the Edwardian gentry reveal beneath their irony, satire, and wit an embittered, frightful world of hypocrisy and cruelty. Her writings are noted for their lack of plot, their absence of description and characterization, and their almost complete reliance on articulate, highly stylized conversations. Among her most notable works are Brother and Sister (1929), A House and Its Head (1935), Manservant and Maidservant (1947), Mother and Son (1955), The Mighty and Their Fall (1961), and The Last and the First (1971).

Bibliography: See biographies by E. Sprigge (1973) and H. Spurling (1985); studies by C. Burkhart (1965) and R. Liddell (1975).