Friday, 24 August 2012  Our Mutual Friend  Dame Ivy Compton-
Burnett (1884-1969)  "With Ivy one is either an addict or an
abstainer." Cicely Greig  Her face is immediately recognisable:
gaunt, stern, remote,intimidating. I have not read any of her
books, not yet, but I feel that I have been led right to the
very edge of the cliff and I am expected to jump.  I have
arrived via writers I admire: Elizabeth Taylor who was a friend,
Olivia Manning who dedicated a book to her, Rosamond Lehmann who
said of her "The purest and most original of contemporary
English artists."  The reviews of her work frighten me "This
piercingly wise, discreet, mannered Victoriana conceals abysses
of the human personality ... a gentle tea-cosy madness, a coil
of vipers in a sewing-basket."  Pamela Hansford Johnson
However, I was entertained to read that Virginia Woolf suffered
sleepless nights after noting in her diary that her own writing
[was] "much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality
of Miss Compton-Burnett"  and I