Biography
Ivy Compton-Burnett always thought she would write, even when she was quite young. She came from a well-to-do family: Her father, James Compton Burnett (no hyphen), was a doctor and direct descendant of the ecclesiastical writer Bishop Gilbert Burnett. Ivy adored her father and from him inherited a love of words and of nature. Her mother, Katharine Rees Compton-Burnett, was the second wife of her father: Katharine became stepmother to five children at marriage and mother of seven more, of whom Ivy was the eldest. Katharine seems to have been the prototype for several of the tyrants in Compton-Burnett’s works: She was beautiful, autocratic, indifferent to her stepchildren and distant to her own. The real mother to the children was their nurse, Minnie. Olive, the eldest of all the children, was bitterly jealous of her stepmother and of Ivy for her close relationship with their father.
Compton-Burnett’s closest companions were her two younger brothers, Guy and Noel (Jim). The three were educated together, first by a governess and then by a tutor, and Compton-Burnett always remained proud that she had had a boy’s education. She loved Latin and Greek. In 1902, she entered Royal Holloway College, London University; in 1904, she was awarded the Founder’s Scholarship; in 1906, she passed the bachelor of arts honors examination in the classics. Her love of the classics appears clearly in her works: Her plots, with their recurring motifs of incest and family murder, seem straight from Greek tragedy; her characters often allude to Greek tragedy; her view of life as cruel and ironic is the tragic view of the Greek dramatists, skewed by modern experience and by her own temperament.
Compton-Burnett claimed to have written very little before her first novel, Dolores, was published. She discounted Dolores entirely in later life, uncertain which parts were hers and which were the work of her overly enthusiastic brother Noel. Between the publication of Dolores and Pastors and Masters, her second novel, is a gap of fourteen years that was filled with family turbulence. After the deaths of both her parents, Ivy became head of the household and a bit of a tyrant herself. Her four younger sisters and Minnie moved out and set up their own household, which they refused to let Ivy visit. Compton-Burnett’s only remaining brother, Noel (Guy had died earlier), was killed in World War I, and the author cared for his brother’s widow after she took an overdose of sleeping pills. Around the same time, Ivy’s two youngest sisters committed suicide. She herself had a bout with Spanish influenza that drained her energy for some years.
In the early 1920’s, Compton-Burnett settled in a flat in London with her friend Margaret Jourdain, an authority on Regency furniture, with whom she lived for thirty years. Jourdain was the more famous and remained the dominant of the pair. The two women traveled abroad together every year, where Compton-Burnett pursued her passion of collecting wildflowers. Every odd-numbered year, with only a few exceptions, she produced a novel. World War II disturbed her greatly, and she and Jourdain fled to the country to escape the bombings in London. When Jourdain died in 1951, Compton-Burnett felt betrayed by her “desertion.”
In her later years, Compton-Burnett was the recipient of many honors. She was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1951 and was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1956. In 1960 she received an honorary doctor of letters degree from the University of Leeds, and in 1967 she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire.
Compton-Burnett dedicated her life to her art, reading and working continually. She had little wish to reveal the details of her private life—“I haven’t been at all deedy”—and believed that all she had to offer the world could be found in her books.
Analysis
Ivy Compton-Burnett has no wide range of style or subject in her twenty novels. Like Jane Austen, she limits her characters to a few well-to-do families in the country. The action takes place in the late Victorian era, though there are few indications of any time period. Scenery is almost nonexistent, and no heavy Victorian furnishings clutter the scene.
Compton-Burnett concentrates entirely on her characters, not in describing them but in having them reveal (and sometimes betray) themselves in what they do and do not say. Her novels demand more of the ear than of the eye. They have been likened to plays in their spareness of description, narration, andexposition and their concentration on talk. Dialogue indeed is the reason Compton-Burnett’s novels draw readers and is her chief contribution to the art of the novel. Each chapter contains one event, which is discussed in detail by one family and then perhaps another, or by the masters in the house and then the servants. Although Compton-Burnett as an omniscient author does not comment on or analyze her characters or their motives, her chorus of servants, children, neighbors, and schoolmistresses do so incessantly. In this way, she achieves many points of view instead of only one.
Compton-Burnett’s novels do have plots—melodramatic and sometimes implausible ones with murders, incest, infidelity, and perversions of justice. At times, she drops enough clues for the reader to know what will happen; at other times, events occur arbitrarily. Characters lost in shipwrecks often reappear; documents are stolen or concealed only to turn up later. Eavesdroppers populate her novels. Several characters, for example, coincidentally walk into rooms where they are being slandered. Although the events themselves are often too coincidental, the highly crafted conversations about them prove Compton-Burnett’s talent as a writer. These witty and ironic conversations insist on the revelation of truth and on the precise use of language, making Compton-Burnett’s novels memorable. Language insulates people against the primitive forces, the unmentionable deeds of which they are capable. Compton-Burnett’s witty dialogue tends to anesthetize the reader’s response (and the characters’ as well) to horrendous crimes of passion.
In her novels, Compton-Burnett explores all the tensions of family life—between strong and weak, between generations, between classes. Power is her chief subject, with love, money, and death as constant attendants. Her main foes are complacency, tyranny, and hypocrisy. Compton-Burnett deplores sloppy thinking and dishonesty, whether with oneself or with others. Her novels clearly indicate her view of human nature. She believes that wickedness is often not punished and that is why it is prevalent. When wickedness is likely to be punished, most people, she thinks, are intelligent enough to avoid it. She also sees very few people as darkly evil; many people, when subjected to strong and sudden temptations without the risk of being found out, yield to such urges. Even her bad characters have some good in them. Although the good points of the tyrants can be recognized, their cruelty can never be forgiven. Ironically, however, their cruelty often produces good results. The victims build up bravery, loyalty, and affection as defenses against the wicked and cruel. Compton-Burnett’s novels, above all, elicit concern for human suffering.
Though she does believe in economic and hereditary forces, Compton-Burnett also believes in free will. She is one of the rare novelists whose good-hearted characters are credible as well as likable. The good and innocent characters in her novels, particularly the children, are not corrupted and usually remain unharmed. They conquer by truth, affection, and, most important, by intelligence. Compton-Burnett shows the great resilience of the human spirit; her characters survive atrocities and then settle down to resume their everyday lives. In her novels, the greatest crimes are not crimes of violence but crimes against the human spirit: one person beating down, wounding, or enslaving another’s spirit. Her novels do not end with a feeling of despair, however; rather, they end with a feeling of understanding. The good characters see the faults of the tyrants yet continue to love them and gallantly pick them up when they have fallen. The good characters realize that evil and good are inextricably joined.
Compton-Burnett’s strengths and weaknesses as a novelist are both suggested by the fact that she has no masterpiece, no best or greatest novel. Her oeuvre has a remarkable consistency, the product of an unswerving artistic intelligence yet also evidence of a certain narrowness and rigidity. By general consensus, her strongest works are those of her middle period, including Brothers and Sisters, More Women than Men, A Family and a Fortune, and Bullivant and the Lambs.
Brothers and Sisters
Brothers and Sisters, Compton-Burnett’s third novel, is distinguished by the appearance of the first of many tyrannical women in her oeuvre. Sophia Stace (who, like the later tyrants, is a tragic figure as well) wants attention and affection, but she is never willing to give in return. She never sees beyond herself or acts for anyone but herself. Her daughter Dinah succinctly comments: “Power has never been any advantage to Sophia.…It has her worn out, and everyone who would have served her.”
Sophia’s self-absorption leads to disaster. Thinking her father’s instructions, which are locked in a desk, will cut her and her adopted brother out of his will, Sophia leaves them there unread, marries her adopted brother (who is really her half brother), and bears three children. Her husband dies of a heart attack after finding out the truth about his and Sophia’s parentage, and Sophia reacts to his death by imprisoning herself in her home. Intending to draw attention to herself, Sophia dramatizes her grief. When her children attempt to resume life as usual, she moans that they feel no affection for her: “I don’t know whether you like sitting there, having your dinner, with your mother eating nothing?” Like other Compton-Burnett tyrants, she turns mealtime into domestic inquisition.
The only one who can control Sophia, modeled on Compton-Burnett’s mother Katharine, is Miss Patmore, modeled on Compton-Burnett’s own nurse Minnie. The children love and respect “Patty” as a mother since their own is incapable of giving love. When Sophia herself finds out the truth, she has no feeling for what the revelation will do to her children. They meet the tragedy with characteristic wittiness to cover the pain: “Well if we are equal to this occasion, no other in our lives can find us at a loss. We may look forward to all emergencies without misgiving.” The children, though they have been Sophia’s victims, are able to realize after her death that she, more than anyone else, has been her own victim: “The survey of Sophia’s life flashed on them, the years of ruthlessness and tragedy, power and grief. Happiness, of which she held to have had so much, had never been real to Sophia. They saw it now.” Power thus eats away at the powerful while their victims rise to a higher moral plane of understanding.
Brothers and Sisters has many of the standard Compton-Burnett plot ingredients: incest, illegitimacy, domestic torture, and the family secret that becomes public knowledge. What gives the novel added strength is the subplot of Peter Bateman and his children, another example of a parent who blithely torments his children. Socially gauche, Peter’s vicious stupidity inflicts painful embarrassment on his skulking son Latimer and his self-effacing daughter Tilly. He determinedly pigeonholes his children into demeaning positions.
While the bond between parents and children in the novel is a brutal one, the bond between brothers and sisters becomes a saving one. Sophia’s children, Andrew, Robin, and Dinah, support one another, and they are not the only brothers and sisters in the novel to do so. There are three other sets of brothers and sisters: Edward and Judith, Julian and Sarah, and Gilbert and Caroline, all friends of the Stace children. At various points in the novel, Andrew and Dinah are engaged to Caroline and Gilbert, then to Judith and Edward, and finally Julian proposes to Dinah but is rejected. The Stace children and their friends change romantic partners as if they were merely changing partners at a dance, partly in reaction to the tragic secrets that are revealed, and partly because Compton-Burnett has little faith in marriage or in romantic love. Her marriages are matters of convenience, timing, and location; none of her husbands and wives grow together in a fulfilling relationship. The strongest love bond is always the fraternal bond.
More Women than Men
Like Compton-Burnett’s first two novels, More Women than Men is a school novel. The schoolmistresses of Josephine Napier’s girls’ school function as the villagers do in Compton-Burnett’s manor novels: They serve as a chorus for the main action and provide comic relief from the main tragic action (Miss Munday, the senior teacher, is particularly good at this). The schoolmistresses, however, have less freedom than the villagers: In a society where unmarried or widowed women have few options in supporting themselves, they are bound to the tyrant Josephine.
More Women than Men, like Men and Wives and A House and Its Head, the novels that immediately preceded and followed it, is a very somber work. Josephine is morally, though not legally, guilty of murder; she exposes her nephew Gabriel’s wife, who is deathly ill with pneumonia, to cold blasts of air. She is also a hypocrite par excellence. When her husband Simon dies, she affects ostentatious mourning and claims, “I am not a person to take a pride in not being able to eat and sleep,” yet she does exactly that. In reality, she feels little at his death. Gabriel, her morose victim, is also one of the few people who stands up to her. When she makes such claims as “I am not an ogress,” Gabriel flatly replies, “Well, you are rather.” His standing up to her, however, cannot prevent his wife’s murder.
There are two other important elements in Josephine’s complex personality: sexual repression and dominance. Indeed, More Women than Men is preoccupied with the psychology of sex and with gender differences. Men and women are attracted both to women and to men. Josephine, for example, many years before the book begins, has stolen Simon from Elizabeth Giffard; she disposes of Ruth Giffard so she can reclaim her nephew Gabriel’s affections; she thrusts herself on Felix Bacon and, when rejected, accepts the love of Miss Rossetti, Gabriel’s natural mother. For Josephine, sex is purely an expression of power.
Josephine’s cruel oppression is counterbalanced by another sexually amorphous character, the comic Felix Bacon. Felix begins the novel as the gay companion of Josephine’s brother, inherits a manor and a fortune in the course of the novel, and marries the intelligent young heroine Helen Keats at the end. He triumphs in that he escapes Josephine’s smothering affection and is able to be master of his own world, yet he still feels a longing for the old situation. One can never break completely free from the stranglehold of the tyrant.
Gender differences are explored in many of Compton-Burnett’s novels. In Pastors and Masters, she had already dealt with the relative merits of men and women. Emily Herrick, the novel’s main character, had maintained that men are egotistical and “devious.” In More Women than Men, Compton-Burnett raises the problem of the shoddy attention women receive. Felix, for example, wryly remarks that parents express surprise that their daughters’ education should be taken seriously. “It is a good thing that they entrust it to other people…they don’t seem to give any real thought to their being the mothers of the race.” Although never an ardent supporter of feminist causes, Compton-Burnett did object to the unequal treatment women received, especially in terms of education.
A Family and a Fortune
A Family and a Fortune is one of Compton-Burnett’s kindliest novels. Matty Seaton, the tyrant, is not like the tyrants of earlier novels: She has neither the highly dramatic and tragic sense of Sophia Stace nor the magnetizing and suffocating attraction of Josephine Napier. She wants to be needed by others and craves power, but her tyranny is limited because she is a maiden aunt (not a mother), because she is financially dependent on her sister’s family, because she cannot actively move about (she was crippled in a riding accident), and because she lives in a lodge separated from the main family in the manor. With these limitations, she becomes a study of frustrated tyranny. Compton-Burnett introduces her thus: “Her energy seemed to accumulate and to work itself out at the cost of some havoc within her.” All that is left of her youthful attractiveness is her overpowering self-regard. She tries to make herself needed by cutting down others with recrimination and guilt, but all her maneuvers are transparent. She releases her frustration by browbeating her paid companion Miss Griffin, whom she even drives out into the cold one night.
While Matty’s energies are loosed into negative and destructive channels, her niece Justine releases her own similar energies in positive and constructive routes. Justine is one of the best of the strong-minded, clear-seeing, female characters whom Compton-Burnett uses to balance her tyrants (Patty in Brothers and Sisters and Rachel in Men and Wives are other examples). Justine is the one who patches the leaky boat of family life with her optimistic matter-of-factness. Self-effacing and comic, she is “utterly honest” with herself, particularly about her own potential weaknesses. She busies herself about everyone’s business but never lapses into tyranny and willingly yields her power when her father remarries. Though a bit officious, she brings a positive force to the family and the novel, insisting that life has meaning: “All human effort must achieve something essential, if not apparent,” she explains. She is one of the few Compton-Burnett characters who is morally good and truthful, but not cynical (nor very witty). It is she who makes the ending of the novel happy—with the two brothers Edgar and Dudley once again arm in arm—happy because she insists it is.
Another remarkable character in the novel is Aubrey, Justine’s fifteen-year-old retarded brother. Compton-Burnett first introduced children into her novels in Daughters and Sons, and they never left her novels thereafter. Children prove useful to Compton-Burnett in the contrast they make with their parents; in the choric comments they can make on the action; in the helpless victims they provide for the tyrants; and in themselves, because Compton-Burnett knows the difficult and sometimes fearful world of children. Aubrey senses his inadequacies and is always trying to reassure himself by saying how much he is like someone else in the family. His dialogue brings out real family resemblances: At times he is peevish like his grandfather, at other times he consciously (and sometimes unconsciously) imitates his uncle Dudley’s clearheaded, mannered speech. Aubrey’s attempts to be normal constitute some of the most moving scenes in Compton-Burnett’s fiction.
One important theme of A Family and a Fortune is that to be “normal” is to be flawed. Matty Seaton treats her devoted companion brutally; her nephew Clement Gaveston hoards gold coins in his bedroom; and Dudley Gaveston, the generous bachelor uncle who inherits the fortune, leaves the manor in a jealous rage when his brother Edgar steals his fiancé. Dudley sums up their behavior by saying that all have their ridiculous moments.
Dudley and Edgar have the very close fraternal relationship so common in Compton-Burnett novels. They almost exclude Blanche, Edgar’s first wife, from close communion, and the greatest threat in the novel is not murder or incest as in the early novels, but that the brotherly bond will be broken. At the end of the novel, however, it is clear that Edgar will return to Dudley.
Bullivant and the Lambs
Bullivant and the Lambs has been the most popular of all Compton-Burnett’s novels; some critics have named it as their favorite, and Compton-Burnett even said it was one that she particularly liked. It is less spare than the other novels, with more exposition, more sense of place (a smoking fireplace begins and ends the novel, for example), and fully drawn characters. A story of reformation, it shows strong bonds of affection among Horace Lamb, his cousin Mortimer, and his counterpart in the servants’ world, Bullivant, the butler.
Horace, a penny pincher who makes his children do calisthenics to keep warm in winter, is one of Compton-Burnett’s crotchety male tyrants. He often looks aside in apparent abstraction as “punishment to people for the nervous exasperation that they produced in him, and must expiate.” His wife Charlotte and his cousin Mortimer plan to run away and take the children with them to save them from suffering. Horace finds a letter detailing their plans and becomes Compton-Burnett’s first and only tyrant who attempts to reform. His reformation does not erase the past (his children, in particular, point this out); in fact, it makes the children suffer more because he inevitably has lapses. The ups and downs of being nourished and then starved torture the children far more excruciatingly than would consistent oppression, yet Horace draws forth deep love from Mortimer and devoted service from Bullivant. Mortimer explains the tyrant’s appeal: “Is there something in Horace that twines itself about the heart? Perhaps it is being his own worst enemy.” The wise characters may be victims of the tyrants, but they also understand and pity them.
Mortimer, like Dudley Gaveston, is an example of Compton-Burnett’s unmarried, rather impotent characters who attach themselves to their richer relatives in the manor. Like Dudley, Mortimer cares more about the children than their own father does. It is these dependent characters who have the strength to challenge the tyrant’s ruthlessness, who speak with caustic honesty to expose the tyrant’s pretentiousness. They act courageously, even though they must mortify themselves (thus Mortimer’s name) and expose their own weakness in the cause of truth. The exploiter needs the exploited, and vice versa.
Bullivant and the Lambs introduces an important new element in Compton-Burnett’s novels: the servants. Like the children, they can mirror their masters or can serve as a chorus discussing the action. The characters of Compton-Burnett’s servants are never better than in this novel: the timid maid; the motherly, nonconformist cook; George, the workhouse boy with grandiose pretensions; and Bullivant, the wonderfully comic butler. Bullivant holds both upstairs and downstairs together with his wry wit and firm hand. He knows everything that has transpired and anticipates what will come. He is also a character of great tenderness and protectiveness, though he hides it under a mask of strict propriety. His devotion to Horace is almost that of an elder brother, though he is always careful to keep his place.
Two important themes of Bullivant and the Lambs are the conflict between instinct and socialconventions and the pernicious effects of do-gooders’ meddling. Compton-Burnett had no belief in God, but she was a great supporter of social conventions as necessary restraints on man’s primitive instincts. The decent majority of men create social and moral rules; the unscrupulous minority violate them. Horace claims that civilized life consists in suppressing one’s instincts, but his wife Charlotte corrects him by saying that all life consists in fulfilling them. Charlotte expresses the complexity of Compton-Burnett’s vision: “There is so much truth on all the different sides of things.”
Compton-Burnett first sounded the theme of meddling do-gooders in Pastors and Masters, in which one character remarks, “I think it’s rather terrible to see it [good] being done.” In Bullivant and the Lambs, Mortimer breaks his engagement to Magdalen because of her interference: “At any time you might act for my good. When people do that, it kills something precious between them.” Like Charles Dickens in Bleak House (1852-1853, serial; 1853, book), Compton-Burnett believes that do-gooders are usually thinly veiled tyrants. The novel ends happily, however, with an act of goodness: The maid will teach Miss Buchanan, the illiterate shopkeeper, to read.
A God and His Gifts
After Bullivant and the Lambs, Compton-Burnett’s novels weaken, showing signs of strain, repetition, melodrama, and lack of inventiveness. One exception to this is A God and His Gifts, in which the tyrant Hereward Egerton overflows with sexual and artistic energy. Through his character, Compton-Burnett reflects on the nature of the artist, which includes essential and consuming egoism as well as godlike creativity.
The most telling criticism leveled against the novels of Compton-Burnett is their sameness. The plots of her novels tend to become indistinguishable after one has read many; the speech of all her characters, no matter what their social class or background, is witty and stylized, and her characters themselves become habitual types. Such charges have a degree of validity, yet Compton-Burnett’s novels must be accepted on their own terms. She was not interested in realistic dialogue; she was concerned with speech as a means of revealing human character. Her tyrants tend to be careless in their discourse, relying on clichés or using words inexactly, just as they are careless in the way they trample moral laws and people. They pretend to be open, but their speech incriminates them for lack of self-knowledge and candor. Their victims, who seek truth, always correct the tyrants’ misuse of language by questioning the real meaning of the words they use.
Whatever her flaws as a novelist, Compton-Burnett was an artist of uncommon intelligence, originality, and control. Her work might best be described in a phrase from one of her own novels, More Women than Men: “Like agate, beautiful and bright and hard.”