‘Uneventful Lives’? Links between Charlotte M. Yonge, Ivy Compton-Burnett and Barbara Pym

Abstract

The lives and novels of Charlotte M. Yonge (1823–1901), Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) and Barbara Pym (1913–80) are connected by multiple similarities and coincidences, which this article explores. While biographers have claimed ‘uneventful lives’ for all three, these women enjoyed careers as highly professional novelists and, in a sense, their characters inhabit the same ‘house of fiction’, in Henry James' phrase. Compton-Burnett and Pym read and admired each other's work and were familiar with Yonge's novels. All brought incisive wit, acute observation and highly skilled conversational reportage to bear on lives circumscribed by social and religious convention but of intense moral significance—a shared moral structure accepted by Yonge and Pym, and subversively reworked by Compton-Burnett. As practising Anglicans, Yonge and Pym reveal a shrewd appreciation of the nuances of parish life, while the fictional creations of all three novelists share character types, social ambience and even names. In addition, the novels of Yonge, Compton-Burnett and Pym celebrate qualities of endurance and continuity, displaying the ability to gather ‘a few green leaves’ from an apparently barren setting.

Keywords:

• Yonge
• Compton-Burnett
• Anglicanism
• Oxford Movement
• linked novels
• genre
• Pym

Notes

1 For ‘satirical letters’ ‘in the style of Ivy Compton-Burnett’ written by Barbara Pym in the late 1930s, see Holt and Pym (1984/1994: 11).

2 For example, that of the Kendals in The Young Stepmother (1861), where the task of training her difficult stepchildren severely taxes the inexperienced heroine Albinia.

3 Having no great opinion of Virginia Woolf (‘Well, is she really a novelist?’, she once asked rhetorically), Compton-Burnett may be referring slyly to Woolf's famous comment in ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ that ‘on or about December 1910 human nature changed’ (Stansky 1996: 2).

4 In An Unsuitable Attachment (1982), a poignant passage describes Sophia: ‘She sat humbly in the cold church, making some effort to get into the right mood for the service. God is content with little, she told herself, but sometimes we have so little that it is hardly worth the offering’ (Pym 1982/1993: 100).

5 For an explanation of these formalist terms, see Wales (1989: 169, 422–3).