Ivy is awarded an honorary degree by the University of Leeds

On 19th May 1960, Ivy attends the conferment of her Honorary Degree presented to her by The University of Leeds.

Taken from the Presentation Address:

Miss Ivy COMPTON-BURNETT, presented by Professor Jeffares.

Your Royal Highness and Chancellor:

Miss Compton-Burnett has given us some sixteen major novels. She inherits Jane Austen's precise vocabulary and delicately pointed use of it; her plainness of speech is matched by sophisticated understatement. Her style is, then, ironic; her setting is a world based on late nineteenth century country-house life; and her subject is the tension between human beings, between classes, between the strong and the weak, and between the generations. For all her novels contain characters with modern methods of thought; against complacency, tyranny and hypocrisy they match their sceptical honesty: politely but persistently; with formality, and also with futility.

Her characters include children, treated with sensitivity and understanding, servants whose language derives trom a Dickensian delight in departure from the norm, and those whose infirmities divert the discriminating reader. Their conversations carry on the action of a novel with a calmness which is deceptive: in the process we come to realize the evil innate in these men and women, for the plots revealed by these controlled conversations are often highly melodramatic.

It is necessary to read Miss Compton-Burnett with intelligence, paying attention to her moral insight. For her scheme of things affords no poetic justice: there are, she says, two worlds and their ways; there are parents and children; there is the present and the past; and there is darkness and day. Upon sinister darkness Miss Compton-Burnett throws the light of day; her wit illuminates our age through the lens of tradition; but she has found new, economical ways of grinding that lens, she affords a high degree of magnification of the human situation which she explores so discreetly yet devastatingly.

She can do all this because of the distinction with which she handles language; she speaks out of deep seriousness and wisdom and presents her superbly comic and her profoundly tragic situations with originality and a rare artistic integrity.

Your Royal Highness and Chancellor, I present to you IVY COMPTON-BURNETT for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.