What sort of woman could write such idiosyncratic works, and
what experiences gave her such a bleak but comic view of the
human condition and of tyranny within the family?
These questions, which soon occur to any
reader of her novels, were unanswered In her lifetime. She was prepared to say
little about her past life or even to discuss her novels. Below her photograph on the back cover of a 1958 paperback edition of
one of her novels she wrote:
'I have had such an uneventful life that there is little to
say...'
Fortunately for posterity, Hilary Spurling embarked on a major
biography within a few years of her death. She must have been discouraged by the sight of her private papers - a shoebox half-full of engagement diaries and fan-mail. It is a tribute
to her research that she was able to write two substantial volumes of biography, based on many interviews with friends
and in particular with two surviving sisters, willing to
give details of her early years.
This summary of her childhood and young adult life leans heavily on Mrs Spurling's work,
and attempts to let the facts speak for themselves in quotations
from those who knew her, and from Dame Ivy herself in comments
she made to friends. Mrs Spurling relates much of her subject's life to
episodes in particular novels. Her speculations are usually
convincing, but I have avoided using them.
Although she grew up in a family of twelve, the children formed distinct groups according to ages and interests. The stepchildren were always regarded as less intelligent than the second family, and, despite living together, it seemed as though two separate families were being raised in the one house. There was a similar sharp division within the second family. Ivy was closest to her two brothers, Guy, a year her junior, and Noel, three years younger than his sister. The remaining three children, Juliet, Katharine and Stephanie were all intensely musical and formed another separate group.
Her father, James Compton Burnett - the hyphen was added later by his second wife - was a physician. he studied at Vienna but eventually graduated in Scotland at Glasgow University. His first post was in a Glasgow hospital where he had a dramatic conversion to homeopathy, and became its pugnacious advocate, writing many books and much medical journalism, and building a large and successful London practise. He was an intelligent, outgoing and strong personality, straightforward and outspoken. He was a good father but lived in London for most of the week, only spending the weekends with his family. When Ivy was seventeen he died suddenly of a heart attack.
Curiously, he met his second wife, Katherine Rees, as a patient, sent to him complaining of weakness and other vague symptoms. He claimed to have cured her, published her case history, and married her some eight months later. She was fifteen years his junior, daughter of a future Mayor of Dover, domineering, exacting, disliked living in the country, and was 'not at all maternal'.
Like other Victorian children, even in relatively wealthy families, the Compton-Burnetts were not indulged: a sparse diet and cold rooms were thought to be good for them, After several moves the family settled in the fashionable part of Hove in a new thirteen bed- roomed, redbrick house. They had about seven servants - cook, butler, maids, gardener and pageboy. While Ivy grew up familiar with the upstairs-downstairs lifestyle, she always lived in new houses, and her experience was of the newly affluent middle class rather than of the hereditary rich and their old country houses, the subjects of her fictions.
Her close companions throughout childhood, and until their death, were her brothers Guy and Noel. Guy, a year her junior, was his mother's favourite, and from an early age was of a strong but pleasant temperament and intellectually brilliant. Noel, two years younger than his brother, was, in his early years, quiet, dreamy and thought rather backward. They formed a close trio, playing together, composing verses, creating secret childhood religions and rituals. They teased their tutor, Miss Mills, who taught Ivy from the age of six, followed in later years by another daily tutor, Mr Salt, who taught the children Latin and Greek. Ivy continued her classical studies with him, and he prepared her for her college entrance exam.
'We came of a booky family,' Ivy said in later life. But that applied only to this trio. The five stepchildren, not 'booky', were separately educated. The four musical youngest daughters became pupils of Dame Myra Hess
There is little evidence that Ivy's childhood was unhappy. The rigours of her childhood were common to most children of her class. There were tensions in the large household. The mother resented her husband's absences and may have resented the social difficulties posed by his unorthodox medical views. She probably resented her stepchildren. Her own Methodist background was a social disadvantage, and her worries about status found expression in the hyphen she inserted between Compton and Burnett. Later she would become a family tyrant. The lack of a close relationship between parents and children is typical of the period for families with nannies and servants. When he was there her father seems to have been a loving parent, especially to Ivy..
All this changed with a series of deaths in the family.
Ivy's life has two phases. The first, her childhood and youth, extends to 35 years and the end of the '14-'18 war. As we have seen it was full of sorrow and unhappiness.
It was followed by a fallow time, after her severe attack of influenza and her bereavements, in which she became inert, if not depressed, and only slowly recovered.
In the second period, which can be dated to the publication of Pastors and Masters in 1925, she emerges as a mature novelist, self disciplined to produce a book annually for many years, and a formidable woman, who said next to nothing of her past and disliked the subject being raised in conversation. She lived quietly with Margaret Jourdain, surrounded by a circle of young homosexual men. In the early years of their relationship Margaret Jourdain was the more famous, cultivated by young interior decorators who admired her furniture expertise. for some years Ivy remained a quiet background figure. As her fame grew she came to be the more important figure, and literary young men outnumbered the decorators and designers.
Ivy has become a gay icon, and figures regularly in lists of homosexual writers, but there is no evidence that she had a sexual relationship with Margaret Jourdain. When the latter died Ivy stated that she had never entered her bedroom in all the years they had lived together. Yet she was sympathetic to homosexuals, attracted them, and was interested in the subject - unusually so for the period. Her long relationship to Jourdain was a kind of marriage, but in these days two women could live together without remark.
There has been speculation about events in her early years. It has been said that her two sisters killed themselves because they were involved in an incestuous lesbian relationship. There is nothing to support the rumour.
More plausible is the theory that her brother Noel was homosexual. It was said that his marriage was never consummated, and his bride was the sister of his closest friend. In the years he was there, Cambridge was full of precious young men and celibate dons, and the atmosphere almost overtly homosexual. But it remains a theory. Were it true it might explain her sympathy with young men in later years, and her interest in homosexuality.
In all speculation about her early life it is important to remember the period. Ivy was not alone in her bereavement - most families in Britain had lost someone in the trenches or at sea, and deaths in childhood were still commonplace in an age without antibiotics. In the post-war years she belonged to a generation of spinsters and young widows with too few men of the right age and class to provide husbands - the officer class had suffered disproportionately. And in her station in society it was the norm to be raised by servants rather than by parents. For all these reasons her early years are less abnormal than we, looking back nearly a century, are inclined to think.
If we imagine her state of mind while she was recovering from influenza it is easy to see how when taking stock she could reach conscious decisions about her future path. She had always wanted to write, and had a book published with literary if not commercial success. She had had years of unhappiness with her mother, had tried to take her place as head of the family and had become a tyrant' but had failed to dominate her siblings, who had successfully rebelled against her. Those she had been closest too had died, young, suddenly, and unexpectedly: her father and her two brothers. She may have felt that Noel had let her down by marrying someone so unsuitable, and have felt angry and hence guilty about his death.
She must certainly have vowed never to be hurt again, never to put herself in such a vulnerable position, and to channel her feelings into her books, where she could work out the complexity of family relationships on paper, illuminate the dark corners of parent's and
children's' lives, and come to terms with the past. She developed a new persona - if the iron had not entered the soul it had surely made a carapace that sheltered her from hurt. She became tart, cruelly witty, the interrogator rather than the interrogated.
She had few remaining weaknesses. She refused to talk about the hurts in the past. She became upset in the second world war and refused to stay in London during the blitz. She behaved badly during Margaret Jourdain's last illness when she was irritable and difficult with her when she was dying. She was stricken after the death and took a long time to recover from it.
Graham Greene believed that Christ was betrayed in the childhood of Judas. We are unlikely to learn more about Compton-Burnett's early years. There is enough information to explain much about her books and her later life, but no one revelatory event, no Kane's sledge, emerges, and it is unlikely that one existed.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - a list of her novels.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - -a typical novel.
Click here to send me an email message