Volume 17, Number 6 · October 21, 1971
Death of the Family
By Christopher Ricks
The Last and the First
by Ivy Compton-Burnett
Knopf, 160 pp., $5.95
What have the following in common: Chaucer, Francis Bacon, Donne, Bunyan, Herrick, Jonathan Swift, Smollett, Lamb, Keats, and Shelley? They are the names of characters in the novels of Ivy Compton-Burnett. In her final novel, now posthumously published as The Last and the First, there is even a Miss Murdoch. Yet the pregnant exchange about Miss Murdoch's portentous verbal mannerisms cries out (silently, of course, as always in this mistress of the tacit) to be applied rather to the novels of Miss Compton-Burnett herself, those skeletons from family cupboards which between 1925 and 1963, from Pastors and Masters to A God and His Gifts,[1] have daunted and delighted with their finely bony family likeness. From beyond the grave—as so often in the novels themselves, where the human will has its last joyless fling when it makes its will—there now comes this disconcerting admonition, a concession which is disarming yet armed; taking the words out of one's mouth and having them as the last word.
Review, 3009 words
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