Attention Must Be Paid: I. Compton-Burnett and her Critics

Abstract

Oliver Shelley’s tongue-in-cheek protest about the unnerving insight of women in Two Worlds and their Ways might also suggest the underlying objections of some critics to Compton-Burnett’s work. Critics bring to a text moral expectations shaped by their experience in the world of reading, as well as by the social, political and economic realities of day-to-day experience. Because the unobtrusive narrator in Compton-Burnett’s novels refrains from censoring characters and their actions, readers’ responses to these texts throw into relief their own ideological perspectives. Most critics who belittle or dismiss her novels betray an uneasiness at her refusal to levy punishment against ‘egoists’ and ‘criminals’, an uneasiness heightened because the writer is a woman, and women are traditionally the representatives of virtue and propriety. Cloaking their moral objections in sophisticated critical manoeuvres, some of Compton-Burnett’s critics attempt to limit, neutralise or negate the challenge that her disturbing fictions present to ‘civilised’ standards of life and literature.

I dislike a woman’s penetration. What credit is it to anyone to see what she is not meant to see and not to scruple to reveal it? (p. 174).