Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett

Biography

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. 

Her novels are dominated by dialogue and brilliant wit and predominantly explore the tensions of upper-middle class family life before the First World War.  She dissects family power struggles and human cruelty with a detached precision - a unique cocktail of remorseless humour and savagery.

"My writing is much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality of Miss Compton-Burnett” - Virginia Woolf

"One of the most original, artful and elegant writers of our century” - Hilary Mantel