Parentage Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in
Pinner,
Middlesex, on 5 June 1884, as the seventh of twelve children of a well-known
homoeopathic physician and prolific medical author, Dr James Compton-Burnett (their hyphenated name was 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.
The Compton-Burnett family 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"), who 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. She attended Addiscombe College, Hove, in 1898–1901, then boarded for two terms in 1901–1902 at Howard College, Bedford, before embarking on a university degree in Classics at
Royal Holloway College, University of London. Her experiences at Royal Holloway heavily influenced her first novel,
Dolores, which was set in a women's college. After graduating in 1906, 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 (where two of them committed suicide together two years later, see below). Ivy successfully managed the family trust, consisting of both parents' estates and largely taking the form of tenanted property, after her mother's death. In the author blurb of the early
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 facts 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", aged 18 and 22, respectively), 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. ==Companion==