Ivy: The Life of I. Compton-Burnett

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984. First American Edition [stated]. Presumed first printing. Hardcover. Very good in very good dust jacket. DJ has slight wear and soiling.. xv, [1], 621, [1] p. Genealogical Tree. Notes. Select Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. From Wikipedia: "Hilary Spurling, CBE, FRSL (born 25 December 25 1940) is a British writer, known as a journalist and biographer. She won the Whitbread Prize for the second volume of her biography of Henri Matisse in January 2006. Burying The Bones: Pearl Buck in China was published in March 2010. She is married to playwright John Spurling, and has three children (Amy, Nathaniel and Gilbert) and six grandchildren." From Wikipedia: "Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE (5 June 1884 27 August 1969) was an English novelist, published (in the original hardback editions) as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Mother and Son....Compton-Burnett spent much of her life as a companion to Margaret Jourdain (1876 1951), a leading authority and writer on the decorative arts and the history of furniture, who shared the author's Kensington flat from 1919. For the first ten years, Compton-Burnett seems to have remained unobtrusively in the background, always severely dressed in black. When Pastors and Masters appeared in 1925, Jourdain claimed to have been unaware that her friend was writing a novel. Evidence that theirs may have been a lesbian relationship is sparse. Compton-Burnett was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1967. Ivy Compton-Burnett held no religious beliefs. She died at her Kensington home on 27 August 1969 and was cremated at Putney Vale Crematorium. Apart from Dolores (1911), a traditional novel she later rejected as something "one wrote as a girl", Compton-Burnett's fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem Edwardian. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another. Starting with Pastors and Masters (1925), Compton-Burnett developed a highly individualistic style. Her fiction relies heavily on dialogue and demands constant attention on the reader's part: there are instances in her work where important information is casually mentioned in a half sentence. Her use of punctuation is deliberately perfunctory: there are no colons or semi-colons, no exclamation marks, no italics. Of Pastors and Masters, the New Statesman wrote: "It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." In her essay collection L'Ère du soupçon (1956), an early manifesto for the French nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute hails Compton-Burnett as an "one of the greatest novelists England has ever had". Elizabeth Bowen said of the wartime Parents and Children, "To read in these days a page of Compton-Burnett dialogue is to think of the sound of glass being swept up, one of these London mornings after a blitz." Lyons has written more recently, "These are witty and often demanding novels, peopled with alert sceptics who are devoted to epigrammatic talk and edgily precise analysis of talk.""