Ivy Compton-Burnett

By: Barbara Hardy

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Paperback | 9 March 2016

At a Glance

Paperback
192 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
23.4 x 15.6 x 1.6

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$75.75

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The first fully detailed and critically contextualised study of the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett

Ivy Compton-Burnett is a strikingly original novelist, writing conversation-novels in which talk is the medium and subject. She is innovative like Joyce and Woolf but more accessible and less theoretical, a modernist unawares. She makes readers think and her terse cool witty style reminds us that the novel is an art. To read most living writers of fiction after reading her is to feel novelists have become lazy and made their readers lazy. She requires attention, and she doesn't write to pass the time or invite identification, but she is amusing and challenging.

This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral love-story, Dolores, which she tried to suppress, to startling stories about landed gentry in Victorian and Edwardian England.

Key Features

Provides incisive and accessible close readings of Compton-Burnett's language, life-narratives, emotional expression and thought
Presents new work of a leading critic
Places Compton-Burnett in the context of Modernist writing

Industry Reviews

Barbara Hardy's account of Ivy Compton-Burnett's writing is as witty and probing as the author she studies. Hardy writes with flair and compassion about a writer full of powerful contradictions. She sends the reader back to the novels newly alert to their tonic insights and their fierce comedy.-- "Dame Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge"
Barbara Hardy's brilliantly incisive reading of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fiction will be a revelation. In her hands Compton-Burnett's lethally laconic writing takes on poetic intensity and social meaning. Hardy reveals its Brechtian coolness, its simultaneously classical and postmodern complexity, its language games, its scandalously detached way of probing the scandalous. The secrets and lies, the power relations of everyday life exposed in the handing of a cup of tea or the cutting of a cake come alive for us. A startling narrative imagination, devastating and profound, a major novelist of our time, emerges from this tour de force of criticism.--University of London "Isobel Armstrong"

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