Ivy Compton-Burnett's Small Economies

Abstract

INTOLERABLE EVENTS alter an unbearable situation: so begins any given novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. From Pastors and Masters (1925) to the posthumous publication of The Last and the First (1971), Compton-Burnett's oeuvre comprises nineteen novels of nearly identical style and subject. The setting is always Edwardian, and while the degree of suffering introduced or habitually borne may vary, the feeling invariably circulates within a limited sphere – the family of a country squire. Families in Compton-Burnett are a potent and inescapable source of pain to those who belong to them. The unyielding pitch of brutality at which they operate prompts one character to express amazement that ‘everyone does belong to one. It seems so odd, when you think of what is involved’.1 Although Compton-Burnett was raised in urban Hove and London and not, as was generally believed, in the rural environs in which her fictions are set, her experience of ‘what is involved’ in the emotional lives of families kept close to that of her characters. The woman who in 1915 was expelled by four of her sisters from the household she governed after the death of her mother had cause to approve of Samuel Butler's assessment: ‘The Family. I believe that more unhappiness comes from this source than from any other’.2 (It is worth noting that Ivy's reign was by all accounts as repressive as those of her fictional tyrants would be: ‘Her discomfited sisters found themselves put down and kept under, their proposals overruled and their attempts at retaliation hopelessly flattened by Ivy's sharp tongue’.3) But the woman who in young adulthood lost two beloved brothers (one to double pneumonia, the other in the First World War) and her two youngest sisters (a Christmas Day suicide pact), once claimed that her life had ‘gone underground’ after 1914.4 Accordingly, her domestic melodramas all seem to take place in an airless enclosure; the staid, serried dialogue and the absence of a material world existing independent of the characters' interactions might evoke suffocation – from either live interment or a surfeit of intimacy. The pain of losing and the pain of having are kept always in close quarters.