Ivy Compton-Burnett is a strikingly original novelist, writing conversation-novels in which talk is the medium and subject. She is innovative like Joyce and Woolf but more accessible and less theoretical, a modernist unawares. She makes readers think and her terse cool witty style reminds us that the novel is an art. To read most living writers of fiction after reading her is to feel novelists have become lazy and made their readers lazy. She requires attention, and she doesn't write to pass the time or invite identification, but she is amusing and challenging.
This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral love-story, Dolores, which she tried to suppress, to startling stories about landed gentry in Victorian and Edwardian England.