One of the most prolific writers of this century, I. Compton-Burnett (as she signed her works) produced twenty novels during a fifty-year writing career that extended from 1911 (with the publication of Dolores, a youthful novel that she later...

Poison ivy grows just about everywhere. It should wear a sign saying, "Don't touch!" But it doesn't. There are no thorns, barbs, or spines to remind you to leave it alone. Instead, poison ivy looks quite harmless. It is a pretty green...

Steps on how ivy trees can be decorated and displayed during the Christmas season are presented. An ivy topiary with the proper trimmings can make or table decoration during these holidays. Tips on taking care of ivy trees are also given. An ivy...

The world that [Miss Compton-Burnett and Jane Austen] depict is normally a limited one, the families at the big house, the rectory, and one or two other houses in an English village…. Why has [Miss Compton-Burnett] chosen this world, and why has she dated the action of her books some time between 1888 and 1902?

The family…. The disintegrating effect of two wars has tended to drive novelists away from the direct treatment of this subject. For Miss Compton-Burnett it is not only the source of her ideas—and therefore of her plots—but also the focus of all other relationships. Her characters are in the first place (as the titles of her novels imply) sons, daughters, wives, brothers, etc., and only in the second place separate individuals with lives of their own. Like the Greek dramatists, with who...

The novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett present intriguing problems of content and structure. They are distinctly not popular novels; yet, like many popular novels, they are written according to a few simple, undistinguished formulae. Scenes that are almost identical occur in several of the novels. The characters in one novel are often almost indistinguishable from those in another, and the crises that these characters encounter are often very similar and handled in the same ways. The locales of the novels might ...