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unique
Britain's only significant post-modern writer. A national treasure,scandalously neglected in her own country.

unique
Britain's only significant post-modern writer. A national treasure,scandalously neglected in her own country.

The arrival of a distinctive style
Ivy Compton-Burnett's first novel, Dolores, was a sprawling and sentimental romance. She was deeply ashamed of it. In Pastors and Masters we see her own distinctive style first launched, laconic, ironic and understated. The story is set in a private school and contains the usualmixture of upper middle class misfits. It is a style that demands closereading. But it makes you laugh out loud on trains and planes. ... Read more

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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 genius—works 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. ... Read more

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Another gem from the NYRB Press
I'm beginning to become addicted to these little neglected treasures that the NYRB Press is reissuing. Not only are the editions themselves little marvels (with beautiful and well-chosen color covers and gorgeous paper stock), but whoever is making the choices for which books are reissued has near-infallible taste.

A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD, like so many of Ivy Compton-Burnett's novels, reads something like a modern updating of a Greek tragedy: most of the novel is told through dialogue, there is a kind of chorus that comments on the action of the principal characters, and the plot involves murder, incest, and familial cruelty. Yet for all these borrowings Compton-Burnett paradoxically remains wonderfully sui generis: no one else has ever mastered her capability for evoking such extreme subtlety in manners that the merest cruel nuances can become evoked (if one reads carefully enough). She is also a master plotter: just when you think you've caught up with the characters' schemes, she allows the other characters in the novel to make similar realizations, and then jumps even further ahead. This is a real page-turner as well as a subtle commentary on Edwardian manners and moral monstrousness. ... Read more

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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? “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. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Good used book arrived in great shape
A huge fan of mid-20th century Brit Lit - Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Kingsley Amis and Anthony Powell being among my faves - I had been meaning for years to get to Compton-Burnett. I ordered a used copy which arrived as good as new. The book itself is interesting, still reading it. Lots of family/neighbor drama, complete with busybodies, under-appreciated servants, poor relations and sad little children. Mostly written as dialog but it moves at a pretty fast clip. If you like this kind of thing I say go for it.

Horrible, horrible, horrible
What is the fuss about this dreadful thing?Why is NYRB bringing another edition of it out instead of leaving it to moulder in the dark, damp corners of libraries unlucky or foolish enough to have it on their shelves?

The plot, such as it is, makes perfect sense.A horrible Victorian daddy, cheaper even than Scrooge, makes his family's life so wretched that his rag-clad, blue-cold children make no attempt to save him when they see him heading off to probable death.His wife has left him; his brother and his aunt are dependent on his charity but clearly hate him as much as his children do; when he fails to die and returns from his brush with mortality a changed man, the consensus seems to be, "too little too late, bub," and everyone goes on hating him.Even his wife, who comes back for no reason I can discern.

Okay.Miss Compton-Burnett is said to be a wonderful writer.I see no evidence of this.She provides no character development, the children's voices are indistinguishable from the adults' voices, the servants are so well-educated that they speak in the same tones and cadences as the family, and no one at all changes in any significant emotional way throughout this book.The one servant who breaks out of service to teach is simply unbelieveable as a character.

All in all, I want my money back, and I want someone to introduce a bill on the House floor asking England for reparations to be paid to all who have suffered at the hands of this awful, awful writer, Ivy Compton-Burnett.

FORTY YEARS ON
She died in 1969, I see. Back in the 1950's she seemed to be talked about quite a lot among reading people, and I remember myself reading a couple of her novels, as a very innocent 13-year-old, and quite enjoying them even then, whatever level of understanding or the reverse I managed to bring to them. On the back cover of my edition I see the distinguished critic Norman Shrapnel saying 'Of the two candidates for greatness among the comic novelists of our time, Evelyn Waugh and Ivy Compton-Burnett, it is her prospect that seems the more secure.' That, obviously, is not how things have panned out. She seems to be all but overlooked now, and I have greatly enjoyed rediscovering her work and trying to form a fresh view of it.

If you will take my advice, don't let your decision whether or not to read this book depend on specific editions or on the commentaries you are likely to encounter. Shrapnel got his prediction badly wrong, but I'd say his estimate of her nowhere near so wrong, although still not quite right. 'Comic' surely does not fit Ivy Compton-Burnett, for instance. Would you call Jane Austen a comic novelist? Ivy Compton-Burnett's mind is darker, but her little ironic darts of commentary are very reminiscent of her great forerunner, and I would even go so far as to say that so is the style of the dialogue. The observations are sharp, they can be very witty, but the total impression is less comic than Chandler, and not at all reminiscent of Waugh to my mind, much less of Wilde.

I shall stick with Jane Austen as my point of reference. Both writers were spinsters whose lives were sheltered. Compton-Burnett lived longer, she lived in an era that was starting to be more outspoken, and it would be hard to imagine Jane Austen's personae making serious attempts to murder one another, as happens in this book. However she writes in a circumscribed tone and idiom, and she does not talk about anything of which she has no real experience. The commentators make a bit of a song and dance out of the undoubted fact that Ivy Compton-Burnett's characters do not stir far outside their big houses peopled by an Upstairs/Downstairs cast of masters and servants, and that she gives little or no clue about the precise time in which the action is set. She told them the answer herself, when she said that her imaginative world was set in the period before the first world war; and for good measure this book contains a reference - a single solitary reference - to the Queen. It's not mysterious, it's not timeless, it's all happening around the turn of the 20th century because that is the period the author relates to and understands.

It also seems to me that there is a tendency to overdramatise Compton-Burnett and her creations. Her observation is close and her social criticism is incisive, but it is hardly 'savage' or anything of that nature. Indeed there is a real streak, very little noticed, of something dangerously like benevolence in her mental makeup. Pace Mrs Penelope Lively, the central character of Horace Lamb in this book is nothing approaching a tyrant or oppressor, although he is certainly a fussy old skinflint. I recommend Mrs Lively's typically insightful and illuminating essay accompanying the OUP paperback edition, but I would suggest that you will find she goes over the top, as writers about this author for some reason tend to do. There is not a happy ending to the story, there are actually several happy endings plus at least one more that is not as bad as it might have been, although the story of poor Magdalen is enough to bring tears to the eyes of the hardest-bitten novels-reader. The author's real insight is in understanding that conventional happy endings do not put everything right, and observe if you will how Horace's two elder boys put their finger on this point - he may have recanted, repented and what have you, but to them he has just not understood that it all makes no difference.

To call the writing stylised would understate the matter. Everyone, but everyone - master and mistress, the Uncle-Vanya-like hanger-on Mortimer, the butler, the cook, the waifs and strays brought into domestic service and most strikingly the illiterate Miss Buchanan - is quite extraordinarily articulate. The idiom of the utterances may not vary much, but the characterisation is sharp and incisive, and this author's characters are both individuals and types, another trait of a great novelist. For me, she is nothing less than that. Don't read too much about her, read her for yourself. I found myself going slowly to start with, because if I missed a line I was liable to have missed a clue or at least an aphorism. I got into my stride after a while, and you may possibly have a similar experience. Quite simply, I think she is brilliant.

A one-of-a-kind author
No one writes novels quite like Ivy Compton-Burnett: they're really more like novelized plays than anything else, and as Diane Johnson notes in her extremely intelligent foreword to this edition, Compton-Burnett's antecedents are more with Oscar Wilde than anyone else, in her love of savage epigrams and wordplay. her novels are almost impossibly stylized: almost all her characters speak in the same style, so small children and uneducated coooks speak with the same level of sophistication as wealthy educated homeowners. Still, for all of its artificiality, you'd be hardpressed to beat MANSERVANT AND MAIDSERVANT as a superior exercise in style. Compton-Burnett's witty and troubling vision of the effect of a wicked Victorian paterfamilias's repentance is exceptionally striking and thought-provoking, and though this novel is not quite up to the level of A HOUSE AND ITS HEAD (also recently reissued by NYRB Press in a stunning paperback edition), it is one of her best works nonetheless. ... Read more

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'It is a real cause for celebration when the best and most subtle literary biography of our time comes back into print, and in a single volume instead of the original two. What Hilary Spurling does, in a beautifully-written book, is to relate the life [of Ivy Compton-Burnett] intimately to the work and show in fascinating details, and with wonderful perception, how her subject's characters mirror aspects of her own nature. The book sends one back to read or re-read the novels - unfashionable, toweringly original tragic-comedies - the most individual novels, it may be, of our time.' The Good Book Guide'Atrue classic of the genre.' The Times'A biographical triumph . . . Hilary Spurling's portrait - elegant, stylist, witty, tender, immensely acute -dazzles and exhilarates.' Literary Review ... Read more

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Nine years after her divorce from Cassius Clare, Catherine decides to re-enter his life. Her decision causes upheaval in the Clare family and its implications are analysed and redefined, not only in the drawing-room, but in the children's nursery and the servants' quarters. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Classic Ivy
Ivy Compton-Burnett is an acquired taste. A friend lent me "The Present and The Past" a year ago saying I had to read it. For the first couple of chapters I didn't who was who or understand what was going on. Was this even a novel? It just seemed to be a lot of dialogue in artificial archaic speech. Somewhere in the third chapter I suddenly, in a flash of revelation, `got it'. I understood the tragi-comic `tone' and understood that by concentrating on the subtle nuances of dialogue all the usual content/interest of a novel would become evident. There are distinct characters interacting and there is definitely plot - quite elaborate convoluted, even melodramatic, plot. But all the usual narrative devices of commentary, scene setting and transitions between scenes have been reduced, almost eliminated.

The storytelling occurs through the dialogue. All the characters speak in a stylised formal way, even children. This dialogue has a sophisticated ironic tone that is blackly comic (it frequently makes me laugh out loud), yet explicitly expresses a tragic sense of the hopelessness and tragedy of life. The main distinction between characters is where they stand in the hierarchy of the Victorian household in which all Ivy novels seem to be set. In other words these novels are about power, guilt and complicity: the mind games and power games into which we are all locked - the Victorian household and its characters becoming universal archetypes. (It may be a far-fetched comparison but I think that in both the settings and the rigorously `minimalist' style Ivy is to literature what Japanese director Ozu is to cinema, with a similar emotional punch.)

Because of the concentrated nature of the dialogue, reading Ivy is very intense and she is probably best read in small doses, one chapter at a sitting. But, apart from that, once you `get it' then reading Ivy becomes easy and addictive. It's not like reading "Finnegans Wake". I've now read several more Ivy novels and they are all similar, though "Present and Past" remains my favourite. It's quite short, focused, funny and poignant. We have Cassius, a typical Ivy father/husband: part tyrant part baby. His previous wife suddenly reappears. This appeals to Cassius's narcissism. He thinks he has formed a kind of harem in which he wields absolute power. But then (a little like the infamous harem scene in Fellini's "Eight and a Half") the previous wife and the present wife start to bond with each other and power begins to ebb from Cassius: his ego, his sense of self and then his very existence begin to crumble. Even the children start to deride him. And then a series of extraordinary plot twists... which you'll have to read the book to find out!
... Read more

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A great feminist classic
An interesting novel about the inhabitants of a large Victorian household. It features a pair of over-bearing parents who are dominiating this mysterious home's occupants. The conversations revolve around the makings of successful marriages. It is significant that the white males of the story are always attempting to boss the women around, as if they had no choices to make in any matters at all. An extraordinary work by a feminist novelist of genius. ... Read more

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HE JUST DIDN'T GET IT!
It's sad that the one-star reviewer on this page just didn't get it.It happens at some point to all of us.Compton-Burnett is an unusual writer, true.She is not a "realist"."Do people really speak this way?" he asks.Strangely enough, there are no actual people inside the covers of this book - only characters.And characters in literature speak any damned way the author pleases.Did King Henry IV speak in verse?This may not be one of Ivy's top five (I particularly recommend "Manservant and Maidservant"), yet it is still quite distinctive and enjoyable.But it's a highly literary fantasy/satire.If you enjoy Peacock, Firbank, Beerbohm or Schuyler, this is your cup of tea."Germinal" it's not.

An virtually self-indulgent kind of book
"The rich are different from us," Scott Fitzgerald is reputed to have once said to Ernest Hemingway -- to which the celebrated Nobel Prizewinning author is said to have (obviously with tongue in cheek) replied: "Yes, they have more money."Now whether Hemingway was speaking in a kind of jest, or whether the whole thing, like Oscar Wilde's declaration of his genius at the New York Customs House, was apocryphal, we will never know for sure; yet the point is well taken.

The rich ARE different. But only in an economic sense. Human nature remains human nature.And it seems the novelist's job is to illuminate the conundrums of the human condition for the reader. So why do Compton-Burnett's characters speak in what is best described as an almost inscrutable language?Yes, the characters in her novels are quite different, but it's difficult to believe people do or have ever spoken like this; it's difficult for the reader to identify with or sympathize over characters such as these being portrayed here.It's aJacobean or a Herculean struggle for the reader to read this odd, quirky, mostly dialog-laden prose of this strange, albeit unique writer.

So to any reader comptemplating dipping into this author's almost impregnable prose, unless doing it out of an academic exercise or personal sense of obligation, I would issue a strong caveat -- be advised: don't. Not unless you're the masochistic type or the type who enjoys the monumental struggle of trying to ferret out meaning from virtually every sentence, having to read twice or thrice, so much so, that quite often the reader is left adrift in a sea of uncertainty as to where he or she is in the course of the story; you'd be well-advised to pass this up.

Still, I am aware that there are reviewers, readers and critics who swear by this author, as being an acute observer of the human condition.Fair enough.But what I would want is to read an author who does not take language and twist and bend it into an instrument of his or her own choosing and give it an almost alien life to that found in this one in which we live.To those who find meaning in her works for them, I say fine, and best of luck.This reviewer doesn't. For communication should be of more substance than merely the esoteric.It should speak to all.

Nevertheless, there are artists who are considered great and are virtually laden with layers of interpretation and enigma, providing commentators and scholars with plenty of work to last some of them -- and us -- a lifetime: Joyce, Faulkner, Proust, Picasso, and on and on.

Let there be no mistake: I am not a stranger to difficult writers, having worked my way through a good portion of them. Start with the works of Shakespeare and go on to that of Faulkner, Henry James (with the exception of WHAT MASIE KNEW, which is one of those books James wrote, like the writer under discussion, which seems to be a kind of closet drama and an insoluble puzzle) and Joyce's ULYSSES, the latter twice and well understood. Even Thomas Pynchon in our own time, who is quite a challenge; even he yields much pleasure, much wit.Never, I say, had I had the kind of comprehension struggle with those mentioned, and even boredom I had with Compton-Burnett.Besides, I have been through a great deal of 18th and 19th century British literature; yet never have I encountered the kind of resistance I get with this author.

A FAMILY AND A FORTUNE is the kind of novel one rejoices in seeing come to a merciful conclusion.I think perhaps a large part of the problem rests more with the reader than the writer.Perhaps.For I suspect this is a woman's book, with a woman's perspective and a woman's sensibility.Consider, for example, this kind of sentence:

"Oh, don't let us joke about it. Do let us turn serious eyes on a serious human situation."

Oh.Do people really speak this way?Even English people of the upper classes? I'm not persuaded. Why not say something like this: "Oh, let's not be funny, but do be serious about this."There are oh so many other examples of this kind of thing that could have been cited.But I'll spare the reader further examples.

This reviewer has been visiting the U.K. for over a fifteen-year period in summers and has never had the kind of epic struggle in understanding them (except in Scotland) that I find here.

Again, I cannot recommend this author to most readers who read for pleasure, which, after all, is the goal of almost any book that purports to be published to be read. The other kind is thekind that the writer writes for the writer's own benefit.In other words, a self-indulgent undertaking. But its author is gone, and like the Faulkners, the Jameses, et al. of this world, will never return to remedy and make clear what, in many respects, should have been made clear for the reader in its original incarnation. The only reason I embarked on this arduous struggle is the fact that I had a professor -- highly regarded and respected in his time in matters of taste and subtlety -- who mentioned this in the context of a lecture on MACBETH.In short, I wish he hadn't. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A wonderful book
Compton-Burnett's artificial prose style takes some getting used to, but her sublime brand of comedy is a rare treat. Characterization is really not the author's forte, but her descriptions of social and familial interactionare packed with blinding flashes of insight. ... Read more