THE LAST AND THE FIRST

by Ivy Compton-Burnett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1971

There is a charming foreword by Dame Compton-Burnett's old friend, Elizabeth Sprigge, who retrieved this slight last novel (the twentieth) from her tattered exercise books for posthumous publication and also an afterword by Charles Burkhart. Both admit to the imperfections of this unfinished work -- Miss Sprigge contending that Compton-Burnett would have developed the plot in a more dramatic way but then plots, always the same ones, were never more than a convenience for the themes, always the same themes, with which they dealt. Namely family, power and money and sometimes the last two were equivalent (""What power money has""). ""Nothing goes deeper than manners. . . . They are involved with the whole of life."" This is yet another of this writer's famous epigrammatic morals displaying her particular sphere where, in between the incidentals of quotidian intercourse, the conflict does indeed go much deeper. Now it is engaged between Lady Heriot, autocratic and arbitrary, and Hermia, one of her two stepdaughters -- Hermia who decides to leave home to headmistress a school, turns down a proposal but is rewarded by inheriting the estate of the man she has refused, and then agrees to marry his nephew. Ultimately Hermia will have used her new fortune for the benefit of both families. . . . ""The surface might easily be seen. It is hardly a thing to pass over."" The surface is once again in full evidence -- the rigidly stylized and ritualized family mise en scene with all its darting exchanges and glancing nuances. But surely it was never as parochial as the Victorian world in which these little dramas took place and one cannot ""pass over"" the universal struggle conveyed between the polite assent and piped-in discord.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1971

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1971

Categories: FICTION