Ivy when young

Ivy when Young: The early life of I. Compton-Burnett, 1884-1919 - Hilary Spurling

This 1974 biography was later expanded into a full-length biography in 1984. ICB was not one to write letters and diaries, though Spurling mines insights from ICB’s marginal notes in her copy of  Samuel Butler’s Notebooks. To conduct research, Spurling read relevant texts and interviewed many of I CB’s living contemporaries. Spurling also has a knack for citing judicious quotations from her subject’s novels, which were usually about families, spectacularly unhappy in their own fashion.

Her father was a well-known and sought after doctor so he did not have much time for his family. He died suddenly which sent her mother into a grief from which she never emerged before she died. The ever-lasting mourning was not made better by her incessant angry bullying of her children. ICB became the head of the household and, with models like her mother, power went straight to her head, just as power corrupts her characters in the novels. She lost one brother to illness before World War I and then lost another brother at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Yet another catastrophe occurred when her two youngest sisters died in a suicide pact on Christmas Day, 1917.

ICB entered a period of lengthy depression, with symptoms such as apathy, social isolation, poor appetite, insomnia and physical and mental fatigue. Gradually, not until she was about 40 years of age, did she come out of it enough to write. Spurling points out that during her prostration ICB read a great deal of Wilkie Collins, which makes sense considering that ICB’s novels have certain over the top quality that we associate with sensational novels. Not the mention the theatrical emotions, hot buried passions, and things like funny business with wills and the past coming back to haunt the present.

I recommend this novel because Spurling provides much interesting background on late Victorian and Edwardian ideas and social customs. Some readers have little patience with details but I like it when Spurling tells us that somebody's dog was named Percy. Readers interested in writers like Pearl Buck who happen to be women or ICB’s unique novels such as a Pastors and Masters will get much out of this gracefully written book.