Two Worlds and Their Ways

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Ex library, usual stamps, boards bumped and worn, spine leaning, foxing. Price clipped dust jacket has a faded spine, purple top of pages faded. Shipped from the U.K. All orders received before 3pm sent that weekday.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Humor, British Literature, 20th Century

324 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 1949

About the author

Dame Ivy Compton-Burnett, DBE was an English novelist, published (in the original hardback editions) as I. Compton-Burnett. She was awarded the 1955 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her novel Mother and Son.

Reviews

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not her best but still bloody marvellous.

[David]

Among the less successful of Compton-Burnett's books, this one recycles a bit too much (the long-hidden, 'unexpectedly'-uncovered love child is getting old as a plot twist) and, essentially, reaches its climax--the decision that, for the youngest children, education at home feels better than education at school--with about half the novel remaining. On the other hand, any novel that can open by naming a character "Mary Shelley" and then more or less ignoring her for the rest of the story, focusing instead on her sisters, Juliet and the astonishingly-named Lesbia Firebrace (senior administrator of a girls' school) as they invest in the education of their niece and nephew and interfere in just about everything else, deserves at least a modicum of goodwill in evaluation. Add a superb mimic actor who is both one of the servants and one of those hidden love-children, and there you have it: confusingly indecisively dryly hilarious, as usual.

[Juliana · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5 stars. I wrote about this book here: https://theblankgarden.wordpress.com/...

[Lauren Albert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some thought was hanging over me as I read this--a haunting similarity to someone else's writing but I couldn't think whose. It finally came to me--Oscar Wilde. The problem with this is that Wilde sticks with funny and does it very well while Compton-Burnett veers between funny and serious in a way that neither are entirely right. There was a bit of James as well with the complexity of the conversations but James loses me in a good way whereas Compton-Burnett just makes me think her characters are speaking a bit of nonsense. There were bits I enjoyed but the dialogue was extremely artificial in feeling.

[Bill FromPA]

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