A great novelist

In a remarkable way the trajectory of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s reputation after her death in 1967 parallels that of George Meredith’s in 1909.

In a remarkable way the trajectory of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s reputation after her death in 1967 parallels that of George Meredith’s in 1909. A recipient of the OM and held in awe by such younger novelists as Henry James, Hardy and Stevenson, Meredith was generally regarded as one of the greatest writers of his time. But now, apart from his poetry — which he himself rightly thought superior to his prose — he is little read, even though every history of English Literature contains a lengthy entry for him.

Similarly, Ivy Compton-Burnett, who was awarded the DBE for having produced a novel of undeviating accomplishment every two years into her late eighties, was in her lifetime held in such high critical regard (‘Only Ivy is great’, Robert Liddell wrote to Olivia Manning, much to Manning’s fury) that she was reported to have kept Virginia Woolf awake with worry about their rivalry. Yet who reads her now? Occasionally —since I think that I am right in saying that, along with Julian Mitchell, I am now her only surviving close friend — I receive a letter from some young postgraduate thesis-writer, usually an American, with a request for an interview. But otherwise the people who can today be bothered with her books are almost always older readers who first fell in love with them when they themselves were young.

Does she still deserve to be read? My answer is an enthusiastic Yes, of course she does. But the problem is that, as she herself ruefully acknowledged, ‘My books are hard not to put down.’ In her introduction to this novel, Compton-Burnett’s second, Sue Townsend warns, ‘Some concentration is needed.’