You can’t understand Ivy Compton-Burnett without understanding her love for her partner, Margaret Jourdain.

“Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett to Elizabeth Sprigge

Compton-Burnett, capable of making any reader’s brain ache in 100 words or less, died on this day in 1969. Legendarily dour, and one of my favorite writers, she was as uncompromising in her work as in her personal life. She knew her characters so well—their quandaries, quarrels, and especially their conversations—that she saw no point in slowing down to explain them to the rest of us.

She once told Jourdain, “I do not see why exposition and description are a necessary part of a novel.” This explains why, in some strange way, you don’t read Compton-Burnett’s novels so much as they happen to you. It’s a bit like being thrown into a bottomless lake and left to fend for yourself in the dark. Foreign, potentially sinister objects might brush against your skin, while, overhead, emotionally crippled people say devastating things to each other. (Some of you might call that ‘the holidays.’)

If you’ve never read her work and are feeling particularly brave, A House and Its Head will make you laugh—if you don’t throw it out a window. It’s as rewarding and hilarious as it is challenging, and you’ll never forget the name Dulcia. But it’s less her work I wanted to remember today than her love for Jourdain, which defined her more than anything.

The One I Miss Most

In Levels of Life, a meditation on loss by the writer Julian Barnes, he recalls:

In 1960, an American friend of ours, then a young writer in London, found herself, after lunch at the Travellers’ Club, sharing a taxi home with Ivy Compton-Burnett. At first Compton-Burnett talked to our friend, in a normal conversational tone, about the club, their host, the food, and so on. Then, with a marginal shift of the head, but absolutely no shift of tone, she started talking to Margaret Jourdain, her companion of thirty years. The fact that Jourdain, far from being in a cab with them, had been dead since 1951 made no difference. That was who she wanted to talk to, and did so for the rest of the journey back to South Kensington.

julian barnes, levels of life

In another passage, Barnes writes:

Ivy Compton-Burnett missed Margaret Jourdain with “palpable, angry vehemence.” To one friend she wrote, “I wish you had met her, and so met more of me.” After being made a Dame of the British Empire, she wrote: “The one I miss most, Margaret Jourdain, has now been dead sixteen years, and I still have to tell her things… I am not fully a Dame, as she does not know about it.”  

julian barnes, levels of life

Her books were rigorously unsentimental, but Compton-Burnett’s confessions about Jourdain were entirely the opposite. And in some small but substantial way, the conversation she never stopped holding with her companion in the years after Jourdain’s death makes the never-ending conversations of her characters more accessible than ever before.