Ivy Compton-Burnett

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett DBE (5 June 1884 – 27 August 1969) was an award-winning English novelist. Sourced A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit. More Women than Men (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, [1933] 1951) p. 54. "Well, of course, people are only human," said Dudley to his brother, as they walked to the house behind the women. "But it really does not seem much for them to be." A Family and a Fortune (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, [1939] 1949) p. 54. As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots. "A Conversation Between I. Compton-Burnett and M. Jourdain", in R. Lehmann et al. (eds.) Orion (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1945) vol. 1, p. 2. "Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth," said his cousin. "But we seem to have no other." Manservant and Maidservant (London: Victor Gollancz, [1947] 1972) p. 5. "Time has too much credit," said Bridget. "I never agree with the compliments paid to it. It is not a great healer. It is an indifferent and perfunctory one. Sometimes it does not heal at all. And sometimes when it seems to, no healing has been necessary." Darkness and Day (London: Victor Gollancz, [1951] 1974) p. 216. Misattributed Pushing forty? She's clinging on to it for dear life! A common misattribution first made by Nigel Rees in Quote…Unquote 3 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) as the result of a mishearing, and withdrawn by him in Cassell Companion to Quotations (London: Cassell, 1997) p. 179. Criticism [A]n icy sharpness prevails in their dialogue. In fact, 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. Elizabeth Bowen, 'Parents and Children', The New Statesman and Nation, Vol. XXI, No. 535 (24 May 1941), p. 536 A review of Parents and Children What Miss Compton Burnett revives is a way of seeing; she sees, with hyperacute vision, what the Victorians saw, and what they had still to see. She has been too clever, or too instinctively wise, to set her novels inside any stated time: the idiom of talk is modern, the way of living dates from thirty to forty years back. Costume and accessories play so little part that her characters sometimes give the effect of being physically, as well as psychologically, in the nude, and of not only standing and moving about in but actually sitting on thin air. For some reason, this heightens their reality. In space, they move about very little: they go for short walks, which generally have an object, or advance on each other's houses in groups, like bomber formations. They speak of what they will do, and what they have done, but are seldom to be watched actually doing it. Elizabeth Bowen, 'Post-Victorian', The Cornhill Magazine, No. 962 (May 1944), p. 95 Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down. Ivy Compton-Burnett, quoted in Elizabeth Sprigge's The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett (New York: G. Braziller, 1973) p. 79 She was one of the most impressive people I have met. But I have come to the conclusion that impressive people have a compulsion to impress. Look at Queen Victoria. Dame Ivy, unlike Dame Edith Sitwell, would not meet people quite on their own level. Pamela Hansford Johnson, Important to Me: Personalia (1974), p. 192 Thinking back on her, it strikes me as possible that she would have made a very good reigning monarch in Victoria's day, if Victoria hadn't got there first. Presence Dame Ivy had: courage and determination: and, I believe, the absolute conviction that she could never have gone far wrong. Empress of India? She would have made a splendid show. Any attempt at assassination she would have met with the scorn it deserved. Anyway, she was absolutely unforgettable: as Victoria is, to those of us who could not possibly have seen her. Dame Edith Sitwell, whom I did know pretty well, and loved, would have made a good job at it: but her sense of ridicule — of herself — would have got in the way. She might have laughed at all the wrong moments. Dame Ivy, at no wrong moments. She was extremely witty, in her writings: but I could never detect a real sense of fun in herself. Those who really knew her, may feel quite differently. I am pleading a rather brief acquaintance. Pamela Hansford Johnson, Important to Me: Personalia (1974), pp. 193-194 As for Pastors and Masters, it is astonishing, alarming. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius. How to describe it—since there is nothing of which to take hold? There is practically no story. A horrible schoolmaster; the proprietor of the school, a don (incidentally, but quite incidentally, a liar and a cheat); the don's half-sister—a woman of cruel wisdom and wit; the don's colleagues; the schoolmaster's subordinates; some clergymen and their families—these are the characters; and the plot, so far as there is a plot at all, turns mainly on the attempt of the old dons to deceive one another about the authorship of a book. There is also a prize-giving. But what happens does not matter. The canvas is crowded; the conversation is close-packed; the unconscious self-revelation of the characters extraordinary. No quotation could do this book justice; the flavour is in the whole; and it is worth discovering there. P. C. Kennedy, 'New Novels', The New Statesman, Vol. XXV, No. 634 (20 June 1925), p. 286 It seemed absolutely wonderful, something quite, quite new. I was so dazzled by it, she became my favourite novelist immediately. Rosamond Lehmann, quoted in Hilary Spurling, Secrets of a Woman's Heart: The Later Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett 1920–1969 (1984), pp. 22-23 The most original novelist now writing in English. V. S. Pritchett, quoted in Time, April 4, 1955. Un des plus grands romanciers que l'Angleterre ait jamais eus. ("One of the greatest novelists that England has ever had.") Nathalie Sarraute L'Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) p. 119; Maria Jolas (trans.) The Age of Suspicion (New York: George Braziller, 1963) p. 112 People say she's out of the mainstream of English fiction, but all good writers are. Muriel Spark, interview with Allan Massie, quoted in Allan Massie, 'Spark of inspiration', The Times (1 August 1987), p. 18 In the age of the concentration camp, when from 1935 to 1947 or so, she wrote her very best novels, no writer did more to illumine the springs of human cruelty, suffering and bravery. Angus Wilson, quoted in Malcolm Bradbury The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001) p. 250. External links Category:Novelists from England Category:Atheists from England Category:1884 births Category:1969 deaths Category:People from London