Her works consist mainly of dialogue and focus on family life among the late Victorian or Edwardian upper middle class. Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Pinner , Middlesex , on 5 June , 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', β by his second wife, Katharine β , [ 1 ] daughter of civil engineer, surveyor and architect "many of the best houses built [in Dover] between and were his" [ 2 ] 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. Stewart wrote: "this persuasion she did nothing to controvert 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.
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" , [ 7 ] 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 to This claim "was unquestioningly accepted by Charles's descendants, and the whole affair passed Compton-Burnett's family tree" [ 10 ] that meticulously traces the family.
Bhagyalakshmi , in Ivy Compton-Burnett and her Art reflects that the former was "a friend's memoir", as opposed to Spurling having taken "pains of a scholar" in compiling her biography. Richard's younger brother William would marry Catherine's sister, Anne; many of the children of both marriages bore the name "Compton". Ivy grew up in Hove and London. She was educated at home with two brothers until the age of She attended Addiscombe College, Hove, in β, then boarded for two terms in β at Howard College, Bedford, before embarking on a university degree in Classics at Royal Holloway College, University of London.
After graduating she in turn tutored four younger sisters at home. 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 , and the more shamelessly lucid Harriet Haslem Men and Wives , , 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.
