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
Occupation Muriel Spark
She later implied that she got this job on the strength of sharing her enthusiasm for Ivy Compton-Burnett with a woman at the local Employment Bureau . She described the work as wonderfully interesting. I...
Occupation Edith Sitwell
It was well attended by women writers. Ivy Compton-Burnett and Bryher were there, and H. D. and Vita Sackville-West were among the other readers on the evening's programme. Dorothy Wellesley was to have read also...
Occupation Eva Figes
EF had a long stint as co-editor of this series, which includes works on Margaret Atwood , Jane Austen , Elizabeth Bowen , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Frances Burney , Willa Cather , Colette ,...
Occupation Graham Greene
GG also worked as director for two different London publishing houses: for Eyre and Spottiswoode from 1944 (when he resigned from the secret service) to 1948 and for Bodley Head for ten years beginning in...
Occupation Elizabeth Taylor
ET wrote amusingly of the horror of appearing on a television programme about books, filmed at Birmingham: sitting on spindly chairs under dazzling lights with other participants (Angus Wilson , whom she liked...
Author summary Barbara Pym
BP was a distinguished, understatedly comic novelist of the twentieth century, whose autobiographical writings (diaries, letters, and notebooks) were published only after her death.
Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. Barbara Pym: A Critical Biography. University of Missouri Press, 1992.
1-2, 9
Pym, Barbara. “Editorial Materials”. A Very Private Eye, edited by Hazel Holt and Hilary Pym, Macmillan, 1984, p. various pages.
xiii-xiv
Having achieved moderate success during her early career...
Reception Flora Macdonald Mayor
The novel established FMM 's reputation for precise use of prose,
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
60741 (4 October 1980): 8
received good reviews, and very nearly won the Polignac Prize.
Williams, Merryn. Six Women Novelists, Macmillan, 1987.
45
FMM was judged sensitive yet detached, firm and...
Reception Elizabeth Taylor
Although she received some glowing reviews throughout her career from some of the most distinguished of her novelistic peers, ET has also been damned with faint praise. She has been called both the modern man's...
Reception Samuel Beckett
Novelist Elizabeth Taylor boldly took her older friend Ivy Compton-Burnett to this play, and was rewarded with Compton-Burnett's pronouncement, Not a play to miss.
qtd. in
Liddell, Robert, and Francis King. Elizabeth and Ivy. Peter Owen, 1986.
96
For her part Taylor thought it as much as one...
Reception Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Textual Features Rosamond Lehmann
They published some distinguished names—including Edith Sitwell , Rose Macaulay , and Ivy Compton-Burnett —and some promising newcomers, including Margaret Lane , Margiad Evans , and Jean Howard .
Hastings, Selina. Rosamond Lehmann. Chatto and Windus, 2002.
240-1
Textual Production Pamela Hansford Johnson
In late 1951 she wrote a booklet for the British CouncilWriters and their Work series on Ivy Compton-Burnett , who was only just beginning to attract attention among those interested in the craft of...
Textual Production Penelope Lively
PL has published introductions to works by other writers including Ivy Compton-Burnett , Edith Wharton , Willa Cather , and Carol Shields . In September 2015 she reviewed Alison Light 's Common People: In Pursuit...
Textual Production Cecily Mackworth
When Nathalie Sarraute argued that the novel is a dead form,CM thought of three examples to prove her wrong:Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette 's La Princesse de Clèves, Samuel Richardson 's Clarissa, and the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett .
Mackworth, Cecily. Ends of the World. Carcanet, 1987.
113
Textual Production Elizabeth Taylor
Robert Liddell preserved the letters that ET wrote him from 1953 onwards. In his book he quotes up to five pages of detailed accounts of visits to Ivy Compton-Burnett .

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