Ivy Compton-Burnett  

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Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE (5 June 188427 August, 1969) was an English novelist, published (in the original hardback editions, ultimately by Gollancz) as I. Compton-Burnett. In her essay collection L'Ère du soupçon (1956), an early manifesto for the French nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute hails Compton-Burnett as an "one of the greatest novelists England has ever had".

Biography

The daughter of a well-known homeopathic doctor, Compton-Burnett (pronounced 'Cumpton-Burnit') grew up amongst numerous siblings in Hove and London. She never married, but from 1919 shared her Kensington flat with interior decorator and historian of furniture Margaret Jourdain until the latter's death in 1951. In the author biography of the old Penguin editions of her novels there was a paragraph written by Compton-Burnett herself:

I have had such an uneventful life that there is little information to give. I was educated with my brothers in the country as a child, and later went to Holloway College, and took a degree in Classics. I lived with my family when I was quite young but for most of my life have had my own flat in London. I see a good deal of a good many friends, not all of them writing people. And there is really no more to say.

This paragraph omits the fact that one favourite brother died of pneumonia, another was killed on the Somme, and two sisters died in a suicide pact on Christmas Day.

Apart from Dolores (1911), a traditional novel she later rejected as something "one wrote as a girl", Compton-Burnett's fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem Edwardian. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another. Starting with Pastors and Masters (1925), Compton-Burnett developed a highly individualistic style. Her fiction relies heavily on dialogue and demands constant attention on the reader's part: there are instances in her work where important information is casually mentioned in a half sentence.

Her punctuation is deliberately bare: there are no colons or semi-colons, no exclamation marks, nor italics.

Of Pastors and Masters, the New Statesman wrote, "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius."


Complete bibliography

Most of her novels are out of print.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Ivy Compton-Burnett" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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