The incomparable Ivy
From the beginning lvy's elusiveness & mystery strengthened her appeal.
Nobody knew who she was or where she came from, and although she was considered a radical iconoclast, those who met her were disconcerted to find a severely dressed, enigmatic and slightly intimidating woman whose "sharp, birdlike gaze made people feel scrutinised".
Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett
A well-kept secret
“My writing is much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality of Miss Compton-Burnett. Now this pain woke me at 4am and I suffered acutely.” – Virginia Woolf. An enigma throughout her life, by the 1950’s Dame Ivy was known in literary circles as ‘the English Secret’ and had gained a reputation as one of the most original writers of her time, writing 19 novels between 1925 and her death in 1969. Consisting almost entirely of dialogue, they are written in a spare, concise and formal style.
Brought up in a household of 12 children
Born in 1884, the eldest child of Dr. James Compton Burnett, a distinguished homeopathic practitioner, and his beautiful but possessive and emotionally demanding second wife, Katherine (his first wife had died in childbirth leaving 5 children under 8). Ivy had 6 younger siblings, including brothers Guy and Noel to whom she was especially close. Educated at home with her brothers for a time, Ivy led an isolated but secure childhood. She was an exceptionally bright child excelling in her studies from a young age.
Her early life, tragic start & new beginnings
In her own words
"People say that things don't happen like they do in my books," she once said earnestly to an old friend: "Believe me, they do."
An excerpt from the acclaimed biography by Hilary Spurling
Ivy Compton-Burnett is a puzzle. She was born in 1884, within a year or so of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, but her particular originality could hardly be further from the strenuous pioneering effort, the stylistic shock tactics and underlying romanticism of the giants of the Modern Movement. Her tone is cool, dry, sharp, irreverent and ironic. She was over forty when she made her debut in the 1920s alongside a much younger generation of novelists like Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, with whom she had in some ways more in common than with her own contemporaries, whose imaginations had been formed and furnished before the First World War.
Pastors and Masters appeared in 1925. "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius," wrote the New Statesman's reviewer. Its wit, acidity and quiet cynicism were picked up at once in Vogue by the young Raymond Mortimer, who would be one of the first to recognise in the strange, condensed and abstracted forms of I. Compton-Burnett's early novels the closest it was possible to come to post-impressionism in fiction. For Mortimer and others like him between the wars, she represented the last word in bold and daring innovation: "something quite, quite new," said Rosamond Lehmann. "I was so dazzled by it, she became my favourite novelist immediately." If the young were enthusiastic, the literary establishment responded with understandable caution to works that seemed to embody all the more unwholesome, frivolous and unsettling tendencies of decadent modern youth. I. Compton-Burnett's second novel, which became something of an intellectual rallying point for bright young things in 1929, had been turned down in manuscript by Leonard Woolf at the Hogarth Press ("She can't even write," he said), and her growing reputation in avant-garde circles over the next decade continued to give his wife Virginia sleepless nights. From the beginning lvy's mystery strengthened her appeal. Nobody knew who she was or where she came from, and the few who met her were deeply disconcerted to find a nondescript, retiring, resolutely uncommunicative character who dressed and behaved more like a Victorian governess than a radical iconoclast. She had not yet evolved the protective formal carapace she would acquire in later life, when her austere features, erect carriage and penetrating stare often petrified even the most sophisticated observers. She seemed already formidably severe to Anthony Powell, when he met her for the first time after the second war. "Ivy Compton-Burnett embodied a quite unmodified pre-1914 personality," he wrote, identifying the extraordinary impression she produced in fact as a construct no less stylised and artificial than the Victorian settings of her fiction. "Her jewellery managed never to look like jewellery but, on her, seemed hieratic insignia," wrote the painter Robin Fedden, describing Ivy in her prime: I do not recall seeing her out of black. She wore it like a uniform, with care but with the disregard of mode proper to uniform. A sense positively of the services attached to a black tricorne, vaguely reminiscent of an eighteenth-century quarter-deck ... For me, the physical impression was recurrently of a Roman head, a soldier-emperor, perhaps Galba. The rolled hair and the ribbon sometimes seemed like a laurel wreath. By the time she died in 1969 she had become a legend, a public image so forbidding and remote that, when I set out soon afterwards to write her life, I found it hard at first to credit the fond, sociable, disarmingly absurd and affectionate creature described by friends who sorely missed her. The discrepancy was only one of many contradictions about her life and work for, as Powell pointed out, the two could not be separated, nor could the mystery of the one be solved without recourse to the other. Again and again her admirers had found themselves baffled and brought up short by her sedate appearance and resolutely prim small talk. It was as if the Victorian trappings provided, in both fact and fiction, a protective cover behind which her penetrating subversive intelligence might operate unsuspected, freely and without constraint.
Ivyisms...
