Background
Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Pinner, Middlesex, on 5 June 1884, as the seventh of twelve children of a well-known homeopathic physician Dr James Compton-Burnett by his second wife, Katharine, daughter of Rowland Rees, Mayor of Dover.
( "The sight of duty does make one shiver," said Miss Her...)
"The sight of duty does make one shiver," said Miss Herrick. "The actual doing of it would kill one, I think." Ever anxious to keep up appearances, self-avowed intellectual and scholar Nicholas Herrick knows that to involve himself in the running of his own school would be a condescension too far. Assembling around himself a cast of fittingly fawning friends and aides, he sets about unveiling his final masterpiece. Described in contemporary reviews as "a work of genius," Pastors and Masters inaugurated the writing career of an author gifted with a rare skill for characterization and for wry portrayals of domestic scenes.
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(A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said ...)
A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said Mary McCarthy of Ivy Compton-Burnett, in whose austere, savage, and bitingly funny novels anything can happen and no one will ever escape. The long, endlessly surprising conversational duels at the center of Compton-Burnett's works are confrontations between the unspoken and the unspeakable, and in them the dynamics of power and desire are dramatized as nowhere else. New York Review Books is reissuing two of the finest novels of this singular modern geniusworks that look forward to the blacky comic inventions of Muriel Spark as much as they do back to the drawing rooms of Jane Austen. A House and Its Head is Ivy Compton-Burnett's subversive look at the politics of family life, and perhaps the most unsparing of her novels. No sooner has Duncan Edgeworth's wife died than he takes a new, much younger bride whose willful ways provoke a series of transgressions that begins with adultery and ends, much to everyone's relief, in murder.
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( At the centre of this novel stands Harriet Haslam, the ...)
At the centre of this novel stands Harriet Haslam, the epitome of the maternal power figure,whose genuine but overpowering love dominates the novel and whose self-knowledge drives her into insanity. Even after her death Harriet continues to dominate. Surrounding this central figure are a host of marvelously realised characters - Sir Geoffrey Haslam, Harriet's husband, an innocent self-deluder; Dominic Spong, a hypocrite whose platitudes do not quite conceal his powerful self-interest; Agatha Calkin whose benevolent maternalism nearly hides the greediest of drives towards power; Lady Hardistry, the most outrageously witty of all sophisticates; Camilla Christy, a loose woman, dazzling, charming, and corrupt. Unlike Harriet Haslam, who will not spare herself the truth, the others are happier with their lies and can never achieve Harriet's grandeur.
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(At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-B...)
At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fictions, Manservant and Maidservant has for its subject the domestic life of Horace Lamb, sadist, skinflint, and tyrant. But it is when Horace undergoes an altogether unforeseeable change of heart that the real difficulties begin. Is the repentant master a victim along with the former slave? And how can anyone endure the memory of the wrongs that have been done?"
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( Eleanor and Fulbert Sullivan live, with their nine chil...)
Eleanor and Fulbert Sullivan live, with their nine children ranging from nursery to university age, in a huge country house belonging to Fulbert's parents, Sir Jesse and Lady Regan. Sir Jesse sends Fulbert, his only son, on a business mission to South America. News comes of Fulbert's death, and his executor, Ridley Cranmer, plans an impulsive marriage to Eleanor... but is Fulbert really dead? And what is the mystery surrounding the parentage of the three strange Marlowes living in genteel penury on the fringe of the great estate? Parents and Children is less savage in theme than some of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fiction and, with its richly funny scenes with the children and happily resolved ending, makes a perfect introduction to this distinguished author's highly individual world - a closed world of intense relationships within late Victorian upper-class families, a world in which the normally unspoken is stated and the unthinkable enacted, with dark revelations blandly emerging from formal speeches of great subtlety.
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Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Pinner, Middlesex, on 5 June 1884, as the seventh of twelve children of a well-known homeopathic physician Dr James Compton-Burnett by his second wife, Katharine, daughter of Rowland Rees, Mayor of Dover.
Ivy Compton-Burnett was educated in the classics at London University (1902 - 1906).
Her first typical mature novel was Pastors and Masters (1925). Beginning with Brothers and Sisters (1929), she produced a novel almost every other year until A God and His Gifts (1963). In 1951 she was named a commander, Order of the British Empire, and in 1967 she was named a dame commander. For most of her life she lived quietly in London, where she died on August 27, 1969. In her novels family tensions, including violent crimes, are worked out in the home with no intervention by police or other agents of society. Dame Ivy's most distinctive contribution to the history of the novel may be her complete break with the conventions of poetic justice, since even infanticide occurs without overt punishment. Indeed, in a Compton-Burnett novel the wicked flourish; it is the virtuous who suffer. In More Women than Men (1933), for example, Josephine, a dominating schoolmistress, murders the wife of her adopted son, whom she jealously loves, and goes unpunished. She then becomes a nicer, better person than she was before her crime, because she is happy. Nearly all Dame Ivy's effects are gained through dialogue, which, as in the following example from A Father and His Fate (1957), is spare, concise, and, frequently. She also makes use of traditional theatrical devices, such as asides, eavesdroppings, and all the rich possibilities of entrances and exists. Miss Compton-Burnett's early works, including Men and Wives (1931) and A House and Its Head (1935), concern murder within the family. The next six novels, excepting A Family and a Fortune (1939), introduce voluble children whose dialogue does not in any way differ from that of their elders: Daughters and Sons (1937), Parents and Children (1941), Elders and Betters (1944), Manservant and Maid-servant (1947), and Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949). Her last phase includes Darkness and Day (1951), The Present and the Past (1953), Mother and Son (1955), A Heritage and Its History (1959), The Mighty and Their Fall (1961), and the posthumously published The Last and the First (1971), which display most of the earlier characteristics although with slight variations of emphasis.
( At the centre of this novel stands Harriet Haslam, the ...)
(A radical thinker, one of the rare modern heretics, said ...)
(At once the strangest and most marvelous of Ivy Compton-B...)
( Eleanor and Fulbert Sullivan live, with their nine chil...)
(Sabine Ponsonby, eighty-five, is determined to keep compl...)
( "The sight of duty does make one shiver," said Miss Her...)
(Page edges tanned. Shipped from the U.K. All orders recei...)
She remained unmarried