Two Worlds and Their Ways

by Ivy Compton-Burnett

Two Worlds and Their Ways is a piercing study of family life from acclaimed novelist I. Compton-Burnett, whose trademark style turns polite conversation into a battlefield of wit, resentment, and hidden longing.

Inside the aging Shelley household, Sir Roderick and his formidable wife, Maria, maintain a fragile order built on routines, quiet compromises, and unspoken regrets. Their children, bright, perceptive, and already learning how adults mask their intentions, move through a world shaped by duty, inheritance, and the ever-present memory of Sir Roderick’s first marriage.

When the question of schooling rises again, it unsettles the delicate balance of the home. Extended family members appear with their own expectations, loyalties collide, and the servants observe more than anyone realizes. Beneath carefully civil exchanges lies a shifting emotional landscape where affection, rivalry, and old griefs meet.

With sharp dialogue and remarkable psychological insight, Compton-Burnett reveals the private worlds people build to protect themselves, and the ways those worlds overlap, clash, and reshape the lives within them. This edition preserves the complete original text for modern readers.

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

330 pages, Kindle Edition

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]

Previous: Manservant and Maidservant
Next: Darkness and Day