Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, was an English novelist, published in the original editions as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Mother and Son. Her works consist mainly of dialogue and focus on family life among the late Victorian or Edwardian upper middle class. Manservant and Maidservant is considered one of her best. Wikipedia  

✵ 5. June 1884 – 27. August 1969

Works

Manservant and Maidservant
Manservant and Maidservant
Ivy Compton-Burnett
Ivy Compton-Burnett: 10   quotes 0   likes

Famous Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

“Un des plus grands romanciers que l'Angleterre ait jamais eus. ("One of the greatest novelists that England has ever had.")”

Nathalie Sarraute L'Ère du soupçon (Paris: Gallimard, 1956) p. 119; Maria Jolas (trans.) The Age of Suspicion (New York: George Braziller, 1963) p. 112.
Criticism

“In the age of the concentration camp, when from 1935 to 1947 or so, she wrote her very best novels, no writer did more to illumine the springs of human cruelty, suffering and bravery.”

Angus Wilson, quoted in Malcolm Bradbury The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001) p. 250.
Criticism

“Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett, quoted in Elizabeth Sprigge's The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett (New York: G. Braziller, 1973) p. 79.
Criticism

“Pushing forty? She's clinging on to it for dear life!”

A common misattribution first made by Nigel Rees in Quote…Unquote 3 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983) as the result of a mishearing, and withdrawn by him in Cassell Companion to Quotations (London: Cassell, 1997) p. 179.
Misattributed

“A leopard does not change his spots, or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.”

More Women than Men (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, [1933] 1951) p. 54.

“Appearances are not held to be a clue to the truth," said his cousin. "But we seem to have no other.”

Manservant and Maidservant (London: Victor Gollancz, [1947] 1972) p. 5.

Ivy Compton-Burnett Quotes

“The most original novelist now writing in English.”

V. S. Pritchett, quoted in Time, April 4, 1955. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,866174-2,00.html.
Criticism

“As regards plots I find real life no help at all. Real life seems to have no plots.”

"A Conversation Between I. Compton-Burnett and M. Jourdain", in R. Lehmann et al. (eds.) Orion (London: Nicholson & Watson, 1945) vol. 1, p. 2.

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