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Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of twentieth-century England's most original and admired writers. The seventh of thirteen children, she was raised in Richmond and Hove and studied Classics at Royal Holloway College. Her family was struck by repeated disasters starting with the death of her father in 1901; Compton-Burnett eventually took charge of the household until it was broken up during the First World War. Compton-Burnett lived alone in London until she was joined in 1919 by Margaret Jourdain, a writer and furniture expert who was to be her lifelong companion. Aside from a disavowed early novel, Compton-Burnett published eighteen highly acclaimed works of fiction in her lifetime, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was made a Dame shortly before her death.Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of the most original, artful and elegant writers of our century. To read her for the first time is a singular experience
- Hilary Mantel,
Shrewd, sly, mordantly funny and magnificently odd, few literary voices are as distinctive, or as entertaining, as Ivy Compton-Burnett's. To see a novel of hers back in print is always a cause for celebration
- Sarah Waters,
Compton-Burnett anatomised primal emotions in a genteel arena: there are shades of Jane Austen here, as well as Pinter and Muriel Spark, but she remains entirely original - funny, shocking, horribly true
- Justine Jordan, Guardian
She is as much part of our great twentieth-century fictional heritage as Virginia Woolf or Elizabeth Bowen... She writes wonderfully, giving her often ghastly characters mordantly witty lines worthy of Dorothy Parker or Oscar Wilde
Guardian
Her scalpel-sharp pen performed startling surgery on the accepted concept of genteel family life
Daily Telegraph
What I find so invigorating in Compton-Burnett is not her alleged cruelty, but her unwillingness to let anyone off the hook when it comes to the complexities of truth-telling... cruel genius
- Maggie Nelson,
Hilarious, harrowing... [like] Jane Austen on bad drugs
- Francine Prose, author of Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932,
Absolutely sui generis... Her remorseless humor and savagery are a unique cocktail. There's no middle ground with this novelist-you're either bewildered by her or you become an addict
BOMB
A remarkable and unusual novelist, who has, in her own well-tilled field, no rival and no parallel
TLS
Dark, hilarious, evil... I have all twenty of her novels and I've read nineteen. If I read the one that is left there will be no more Ivy Compton-Burnett for me and I will probably have to die myself
- John Waters,
A radical thinker, one of our rare modern heretics
- Mary McCarthy,
Darkly acerbic critiques
Vogue
To re-read an utterly original writer like Virginia Woolf or Ivy Compton-Burnett is to be reminded how narrow is the domain of the traditional novel and what worlds, inner and outer, still wait to be explored
- Gabriel Josipovici,
I looked for all her novels... I loved them furiously
- Natalia Ginzburg,