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    The Present and the Past
    The Present and the Past
    The Present and the Past
    Ebook230 pages2 hours

    The Present and the Past

    By Ivy Compton-Burnett

    3.5/5

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    "Ivy Compton-Burnett is one of the most original, artful, and elegant writers of our century." — Hilary Mantel

    When Cassius Clare and his first wife divorced, he insisted upon retaining custody of their two sons; he then remarried and fathered three more children. Now the first Mrs. Clare has returned after nine years' absence, begging to be allowed to visit the children. Cassius takes a malicious pleasure in granting her request, certain that she and the second Mrs. Clare will provide him with an amusing sideshow. Instead, the two women strike up a warm friendship that leaves him out in the cold — and contemplating an attention-getting suicide attempt.
    Compton-Burnett was known as a writer's writer: Joyce Carol Oates called her work "Aeschylus and Sophocles funnily reinvented by Oscar Wilde"; John Waters described her books as "dark, hilarious, evil little novels"; and V. S. Pritchett, in 1955, noted she was "the most original novelist now writing in English." Discover for yourself why Compton-Burnett is treasured by such a wide range of authors.

    "Precise, poised, studied, epigrammatic artistry." — Kirkus

    "Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down." — Ivy Compton-Burnett

    "A rich story, told with far deeper insight and a bolder, more sure-footed appreciation of subtleties, than I think any of Compton-Burnet's contemporaries could achieve." — The Spectator (U.K.)
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateOct 16, 2019
    ISBN9780486844442
    The Present and the Past
    Author

    Ivy Compton-Burnett

    Ivy Compton-Burnett was born in Middlesex in 1884. Compton-Burnett was encouraged by her liberal and unorthodox father, homeopath Dr Burnett, to prepare to read classics at London university (neither Oxford nor Cambridge gave degrees to women at this time). She had dearly loved her father, who died without warning from a heart attack in 1901 when she was sixteen. Her closest brother died three years later, and Ivy Compton-Burnett went on to lose three more of her younger siblings and her mother by the time she was 35, something she could hardly bear to speak about, but constantly explored in her novels. Compton-Burnett published twenty novels, the first while she was in her twenties, in 1911. However, the first of her works to use her mature and startlingly original style was published when she was forty, in 1925. Compton-Burnett's fiction deals with domestic situations in large households which, to all intents and purposes, invariably seem Edwardian. The description of human weaknesses and foibles of all sorts pervades her work, and the family that emerges from each of her novels must be seen as dysfunctional in one way or another. She was named a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1967, two years before her death in 1969.

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    3.5/5

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    • 4/5
      I have been wanting to read Ivy Compton-Burnett since reading Virginia Woolf's diaries, in which she wrote that she was kept awake at night by the fact that her own writing was "much inferior to the bitter truth and intense originality of Miss Compton-Burnett."

      The Present and the Past has a plot that is almost entirely guided by dialog, forcing the reader to focus on characters and become as intensely involved in personal analysis as they do. Sometimes it feels like roaming through the brain of an obsessive-compulsive, becoming trapped in feedback loops of anxiety and second-guessing oneself. Ultimately, though, this is a book about narcissism, how the way we see ourselves differs greatly from the ways in which we are seen, and how our perceptions predictably change after someone has died. If you are more interested in dialog than description, and don't mind becoming immersed in the often agonizing ruminations of ordinary people, you will love this book.

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