Poison Ivy

‘Who was she?’, a browser might ask on finding three re-issued novels by Ivy Compton-Burnett, and ‘Why should I read them?’ Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884-1969) was one of 13 children of a Victorian physician. After his death, his widow wrapped herself in anger and subjected her children to cruel, neurotic tyranny. Their verbal laceration continued after her death in 1911, for Ivy took control of her siblings, and enforced a sadistic autocracy learnt from her mother. On Christmas Day 1917, the two youngest girls, ‘Topsy’ and 18-year-old ‘Baby’, for whom family life seethed with aggression, nerve storms and spite, locked themselves in a bedroom, and died in one another’s arms of overdoses of barbiturates. ‘Too much music in their lives,’ Ivy said in explanation of their suicides. Another brother killed himself in 1935 by leaping off a bridge; only two of the siblings married, and none had children to perpetuate the dynastic misery.