"I see a great many qualities in Mrs Napier, some of them good and very few of them ordinary", October 16, 2014

This review is from: More Women Than Men (Paperback)
Ivy Compton-Burnett has a writing style all of her own - this is the third of her works I have read (albeit at long intervals) so I definitely quite like them.
Set in a girls' school, among the teaching staff and their relatives (the schoolchildren don't appear at all), Compton-Burnett manages, through clever conversation, to portray the thoughts and feelings of her characters. Her works are almost all dialogue, and I found myself appreciating it better if I read it out loud like a play.
None of the speech is at all realistic; the plot, and events, too, are strangely stilted. And yet you want to keep on reading...
The story basically revolves around kindly (or is she?) Mrs Napier, the self-sacrificing headmistress, bringing up her brother's son, Gabriel, as her own. Meanwhile, the brother in question has a young male lover, whom Mrs Napier has just taken on as art teacher. And suddenly into the story comes Mrs Giffard and her daughter: some 25 years ago this lady had a romance with Mr Napier.... ( )

Ten years ago someone might have reviewed this and described it as a tale of repressed homosexuality, in which the 'secret' of the characters sexuality is displaced into a variety of other secrets more to do with what we still regard as morality: secrets of maternity, and the awful treatment of friends. Today, though, I don't think anyone could suggest that the sexuality here is repressed at all, which is nice. It is, though, tied up with the other secrets of the book, which are slowly and humourously revealed. ICB books aren't easy going, and her style is extraordinary. The violent death of a husband or the death from illness of a wife is described just as calmly as a breakfast table. I got the impression that every character was using words to deflect attention from their actual intentions and desires, with the exception of the most obviously 'fake' man, whose absurdly mannered way of expressing himself reveals that he is in fact the most authentic person in the novel.

Towards the end of the novel, the school's headmistress, Josephine, asks of her teachers, "you will not use words upon what we have dealt with without words?" And that's a pretty good summary of the novel, which manages, despite not using words upon the community's various secrets, to reveal them very well indeed. I'm sure graduate students everywhere would enjoy writing a paper about MWTM: aside from sexuality, it also deals with gender, class and morality. Thankfully, it's an example of how you can deal with all of those things without turning into a boring, libertarian prig. ( )

"Read More Women than Men by I. Compton-Burnett and saw no point in it - unreal people and not much of a story." (Diary entry, 15 September 1933.) (Pym, A very private eye. Macmillan, 1984. p. 26.)

Spoilers. I read 2 by I C-B together. This was worse. Jeez! The sex is muted and maybe that is what made it so weird, but maybe not. The characters just moved around in the lives & their proclivities in an odd stilted & jolting way. Woman runs a school for women, she is married & has raised her brother's child. Her brother does nothing and has a younger man who lives with him & sits on his knee. So there's a gay male couple. In the school are a bunch of teachers including 2 who are very close, A and B. So there's a gay female couple. Then the events begin. Complicated & gothic & weird. The main character is perhaps evil. When she was engaged to be married her husband-to-be had a true first love who had married somebody else, word came that that woman had been widowed but our heroine didn't tell her husband til after the wedding. Of course, first love shows up 25 years later, and ends up causing the accidental death of the husband. She brings her daughter & adopt son decides to marry daughter & MC disapproves and acts out, but marriage occurrs...couple comes back to visit...girl is sick...MC nurses her faithfully except that one time when she allows her to expose herself to the bad night air & she dies. Remember A&B. B sees the exposure and is suspicious, B wants to buy a partnership but has been rebuffed, now partnership is offered but B says No, then MC finds out B is actually the mother of the adopted son. B doesn't want a son, has never felt motherly, but she did give the kid money. So now MC gets B to accept partnership, B says you're the one I love the best...so is this a new lesbian couple? We see the first embrace of their partnership.... But meanwhile, younger man who is pet of MC's brother becomes drawing master at the school, reconciles with his father, takes all his father's drying criticisms to heart & makes promises on father's deathbed, and sudden becomes a conservative landholder and marries a nice young woman. Adopted son & his true father plan to live together. OK, I'll stop now.