TYRANTS
He reminds us that the nineteenth century in England was a time of unhappy families, and cites the Brontes, the Butlers, the Barretts and the Ruskins. An increasingly prosperous middle class was able to keep their offspring at home for longer, the influence of the Old Testament was powerful, and the cult of childhood encouraged its prolongation. These conditions have altered rapidly in this century with the decline of religion and the large family.
Her first ten mature novels contain a range of family tyrants: three fathers, a grandfather, two mothers, a grandmother, and four aunts. The fathers are landed gentry; they are despots, and know they are despots; believe that their behaviour is helpful to the family, and expect gratitude for it. The female tyrants use more subtle means to achieve their ends, manipulating their families by moral blackmail and invalidism. They are devious but may have much charm.
HAPPENINGS
The tyrants are rarely purely evil, and all are balanced by the friendship of a good character. Most of the novels have an ending which resolves the family problems, but it is rarely a happy one - more a 'sober calm, like the close of a Greek tragedy'. The plots use the two classical devices of Greek tragedy, peripeteia and anagnorisis - the first a violent event which reverses circumstances, the second a point of discovery such as the revelation of a secret - to resolve the problems of the family. These events may be as melodramatic as those in a bad Victorian novel, and extend to incest, infanticide and matricide. The plots often demonstrate the author's belief that in real life wickedness often goes unpunished, and that strange things happen which are often suppressed.
VICTIMS
Liddell divides victims into adults and adolescents, children, governesses and servants. Tyranny in the family unites the victims in love and affection, and this lightens the tragic side of the novels. The victims are usually 'good' people. Children are victims, too, but often are less exposed to the tyrant as they spend less time with the adults. Governesses in their turn are tyrannised by the children if they are incompetent. The servants are not always victims; the butlers and cooks tend to lead happy lives, the former often giving as good as they take upstairs. The senior servants in turn tyrannise the lower ranks of the servants quarters, in an often comic parody of events above stairs.
CHORUS
There are witnesses to these events, and they comment on them like a Greek chorus, powerless to help or hinder. They are of many character types, including the Curious, the Prigs, the Toadies, the Good Governesses, the Aloof, and the Lower Classes.
WRITING
The story is told and the characters revealed almost entirely in dialogue. There is little narrative, few comments on the characters and events, and the writer conceals her own personality effectively . There is little description of landscape, and only short descriptions of appearance when characters are first introduced.
There are brief but illuminating 'stage directions', and Liddell lists some 250 adjectives and phrases used to describe the way in which characters speak. The dialogue thus precisely notated is brilliant, clever, aphoristic, and often, but not always, stylised. She uses another device from Greek drama: stichomythia - the fast exchange of one-liners between the characters.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - Barbara Pym, Robert Liddell and Ivy Compton-Burnett
Ivy Compton -Burnett - -a typical novel.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - a short biography
Ivy Compton -Burnett and Virginia Woolf - what they thought of each other.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - a list of her novels. What's best? What first?
Ivy Compton -Burnett - proverbs, clichés, aphorisms.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - Plautus the Cat and Friends.
Ivy Compton -Burnett - her own views on her writing and its morality.