Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, (; 5 June 188427 August 1969) 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.
Background
Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Pinner, Middlesex, on 5 June 1884, as the seventh of twelve children of a well-known homeopathic physician and prolific medical author, Dr James Compton-Burnett (the names were hyphenated and pronounced 'Cumpton-Burnit', 1840–1901) by his second wife, Katharine (1855–1911), daughter of civil engineer, surveyor and architect (many of the best houses built [in Dover] between 1850 and 1860 were his") Rowland Rees, who was also Mayor of Dover. Given the subjects of most of her works, it was widely assumed that the Compton-Burnett family were landed gentry; in his review of the final volume of Hilary Spurling's biography, J. I. M. Stewart wrote: "this persuasion she did nothing to controvert... when her ardent admirer and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not many generations back, and Mrs Spurling thinks that Ivy must have been about thirty before seeing the inside of an English country house." According to Spurling, "Ivy's... friends in later life generally assumed that she came, as the families do in her books, of a long line of country squires." In fact "she had moved with her family four times before she was 14, living on housing estates or in brand new suburban developments, hearing practically nothing about her Compton Burnett relations."
The Compton-Burnett family in fact descended from small tenant farmers of Gavelacre Farm, near Winchester, Hampshire (who despite owning no land called themselves "yeomen"), pretended since the time of Ivy's grandfather Charles to be descended from the younger branch of the landowning Scottish Burnett (also Burnet) family through Alexander Burnett, 12th Laird of Leys, his son, judge Robert Burnet, Lord Crimond, and his grandson Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury from 1689 to 1715. This claim "was unquestioningly accepted by Charles's descendants, and the whole affair passed... rapidly into family legend." This claim is repeated in Elizabeth Sprigge's The Life of Ivy Compton-Burnett; it was the later biography by Hilary Spurling (in which she notes the "many misleading claims... made for I. Compton-Burnett's family tree") that meticulously traces the family. J. Bhagyalakshmi, in Ivy Compton-Burnett and her Art (1986) reflects that the former was "a friend's memoir", as opposed to Spurling having taken "pains of a scholar" in compiling her biography. James Compton-Burnett's father, Charles, was an itinerant farm labourer – among other places at Redlynch, near Salisbury, where his son was born – who later settled at French Street, in a poor area of Southampton, and went into business as a corn and coal dealer, later living at Millbrook, outside Southampton, and working as a dairyman. (Before Spurling's research, it had been claimed that he was "a considerable landowner" at Redlynch, but the Compton-Burnetts of Charles's generation were in fact working-class labourers and grocers, and despite their claims over several generations of yeoman status, the Compton-Burnett family never owned any land. The "Compton" name had been used since the 1803 marriage of James Compton-Burnett's grandfather, Richard Burnett, to a Catherine Maria Compton, of Hampshire, allegedly in honour of her "large fortune"; in fact, she was daughter of a blacksmith, who loaned his son-in-law £300. Richard's younger brother William would marry Catherine's sister, Anne; many of the children of both marriages bore the name "Compton". Ivy Compton-Burnett's first cousin was Margery Blackie, a homeopathic physician.