Ivy Compton-Burnett - Early Life

Early Life

Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Pinner, Middlesex, on 5 June 1884, as the seventh of twelve children of the well-known homeopathic physician Dr James Compton-Burnett (pronounced 'Cumpton-Burnit'), by his second wife, Katharine (1855–1911), daughter of Rowland Rees, civil engineer. She grew up in Hove and London. She was educated at home with two brothers until the age of 14. She attended Addiscombe College, Hove, in 1898–1901, then boarded for two terms in 1901–2 at Howard College, Bedford, before embarking on a university degree in Classics. After graduating she in turn tutored four younger sisters at home.

Ivy's mother sent all her stepchildren away to boarding school as soon as possible. According to the scholar Patrick Lyons, "In widowhood Compton-Burnett's mother provided her with an early model for the line of outrageous domestic bullies that appear in her novels, anticipating the grief-stricken and over-demanding Sophia Stace (Brothers and Sisters, 1929) and the more shamelessly lucid Harriet Haslem (Men and Wives, 1931), who declares candidly: 'I see my children's faces, and am urged by the hurt in them to go further, and driven on to the worse.' Four of Ivy's sisters rebelled against home life in 1915 and moved up to London to live in a flat with the pianist Myra Hess. Ivy successfully managed the considerable family fortune after her mother's death.

In the author blurb of the old Penguin editions of her novels there was a paragraph written by Compton-Burnett herself: "I have had such an uneventful life that there is little information to give. I was educated with my brothers in the country as a child, and later went to Holloway College, and took a degree in Classics. I lived with my family when I was quite young but for most of my life have had my own flat in London. I see a good deal of a good many friends, not all of them writing people. And there is really no more to say." This omits the fact that her favourite brother, Guy, died of pneumonia; another, Noel, was killed on the Somme, and her two youngest sisters, Stephanie Primrose and Catharine (called "Baby" and "Topsy"), died in a suicide pact by taking veronal in their locked bedroom on Christmas Day, 1917. Not one of the twelve siblings had children, and all eight girls remained unmarried.