Ten years ago, Hilary Spurling’s Ivy When Young: The early life of I Compton-Burnett, 1884-1919 was published (recently paperbacked by Allison & Busby) and universally praised as one of the most fascinating and distinguished biographies. It is the story of a family – the Compton-Burnett household – fraught with tragedy and tension, dramatic and searing. The events and protagonists in this conflict of temperaments are Greek in tone, raw material, as Hilary Spurling demonstrates, for nineteen revolutionary novels aptly described by Mary McCarthy as ‘subversive packets’.

It could be said that all that happened to Ivy – life that is – occurred during her first thirty-five years, although what follows in Hilary Spurling’s second volume, Secrets of a Woman’s Heart, is the ultimate flowering of a hardy shrub putting out a regular blossom in those remarkable and unique novels so totally unrelated to any fiction previously published. Novels in which what happens is of less consequence than how the characters view themselves, and how they make out in the combat of personal relationships. Incidents such as murder, incest, forgery, sexual passion, homosexuality are, in a sense, vulgar parlance, commonplace detail to be mentioned as stage instructions. What counts is the expressions of the personalities involved in these dark deeds, how each sees their respective truths and deceptions and deals with truth and deception practised by others. The medium used for this monstrous exposition is dialogue – sharp, acid, witty, epigrammatic through which characters speak not only what they have to say to another, but that which they think about another. There is little. one feels, that the author does not know or probe. Human nature is firmly grasped, thoroughly scrutinised and exhibited with no attendant moral label. Ivy had looked and found it so, is the general conviction. Dispensing with moral judgements she rests her case with a certain preference for the survivors.

As Hilary Spurling’s earlier volume shows, Ivy’s first thirty-five years were testing enough for any survivor. Enough here to recall some data. The eldest daughter of a second marriage, Ivy was born into domestic conflict with five step-siblings to contend with. Her father, a genial and scholarly homeopathic doctor died when she was seventeen, leaving her pampered and neurotic mother, who cared not for children, with six more. There was enough money for servants, governesses, and creature comforts. Victorian on the surface, it was a battlefield of clashing wills. Following her mother’s death Ivy took on the role as head of the household, ruled tyrannically over her sisters, while doting on her brothers – Guy who died in 1905 and Noel, killed in 1916, who was the much beloved and whose death brought her big ‘smash’. Recovery was not easy. Even so she schooled herself to cope. Efficient in practical matters and skilled with money, Ivy looked after her sister-in-law (Ivy’s distress at Noel’s marriage was violent if concealed), disowned her sisters, endured the trauma of the double suicide of her two youngest sisters, and settled herself in London with a friend who married the man who was courting them both.

Victim of the influenza plague of 1918 (lack of antibiotics made this a near fatal illness), she recovered slowly, lying on the sofa munching chocolates and taking to needlework. As she said to me ‘one did get very delayed’. She had published, at her expense, a novel Dolores which she later disowned: ‘my brother meddled with it’ In 1919 she met Margaret Jourdain and took her into her flat. Hilary Spurling’s early volume ends with this meeting which was to provide a relationship and security needed by Ivy. Ivy was then thirty-five, Margaret forty-three.

Secrets of a Woman’s Heart is a biographical triumph. I should be surprised if it was not selected as the biography of the year. It has all the superlatives of a classic. The earlier volume was enthralling; this one is radiant. It matters not whether you enjoy Ivy’s work or are interested in her personality. Hilary Spurling’s portrait elegant, stylish, witty, tender, immensely acute – dazzles and exhilarates. To be commonplace, one simply cannot put it down, which would have tempted its subject to point out that a book might easily be placed aside for luncheon. Certainly it will provoke those now in the dark to rush to Ivy’s novels, feeling that they have hitherto missed miracles of delight. What is so marvellous is the fact that Hilary Spurling never met Ivy, yet has caught her so vividly.

In 1925 Pastors and Masters, the first of those nineteen novels to be produced regularly every two years, was published. It provoked initial shock: Margaret was horrified’. Until then Margaret had shone as the creative one, established as she was as an authority on English furniture, in her youth a poet. Margaret had brought the literary world to Ivy, although as the latter remarked, she ‘came of a booky family’ Ivy had been the companion in the background, reserved, considered a bit dull. Suddenly she took over. Visitors came to see her. Fans made themselves known. Hilary Spurling frankly examines the relationship. No sex. No latent homosexuality. Margaret was prudish. ‘A marriage of convenience’, Hilary Spurling puts it in perspective. They enjoyed companionship, travelled together, had friends in common (mostly homosexual), and, as Ivy’s fame increased, jealousy crept in. although basic devotion prevailed. That was my impression, although I always thought Ivy flirted with her own sex. As one of her characters put it about preference for one’s own sex: ‘Most people do. It is a thing that has not been noticed’.

‘We are neutrals’, so Ivy defined herself and Margaret. One takes that with a grain of salt as far as Ivy went. In her later years she quite definitely went out to charm her admirers and was lovingly possessive. Hilary Spurling amusingly draws that circle of admirers, the mixture of snobs and literati who eyed each other balefully and whom Ivy delighted to pitch against each other. The loss of Margaret was Ivy’s final tragedy, one which she coped with admirably (helped in this by her growing fame and her advancement to a Dame). although ever ready quite simply to say how deeply she missed Margaret.

Where Hilary Spurling excels is in her ability to explain the work and indicate with distinctive clarity the plots and themes of each book. So often the comment has been – even from fervent admirers – that they are hard to differentiate. Endearingly Ivy herself wished to be a ‘bestseller’. She had no doubt as to her fiction’s potentials: ‘good plots, interesting characters, plenty of sex’. Which of course is true. She was nothing if not literal. Her relationship to her publisher and agent is wittily recounted. Every author would wish to instruct their agent, as did Ivy over Gollancz’s lack of advertising, with ‘Will you ask him what his reasons are for not wanting to sell my books?’. Her sales were hardly dismissible in the last two decades of her life. She enjoyed knowing that hers was a name fast becoming a landmark in contemporary literature. Much fascinating detective work has been done by Hilary Spurling as she indicates sources for characters and themes. Ivy used her friends and many traits are recognisable in her fiction. Ivy adored her bachelor admirers who courted her. Hilary Spurling dashingly writes about all these jazzy characters. Heavenly gossip of the best kind – that is without malice. What Ivy did not care for was a married couple; a ménage à trois was, to her way of thinking, a better option, since the two women could be friends (or two men doubtless).

As her fame grew so did her vitality. Those who met her during her last decades left her luncheon and tea parties feeling as though they had attended a celebration. All this Hilary Spurling encapsulates, perfectly conveying the sparkle of such occasions, witty and stimulating. Seldom did one go away without pocketing some wondrous sentence uttered in Ivy’s inimitable, prim yet musical voice. Impressions and letters are admirably selected from: especially interesting are those from Rosamond Lehmann, Robert Liddell and Elizabeth Taylor.

As a literary critic Hilary Spurling is superb, especially so in not wholly concentrating on the tyrants in Ivy’s books: ‘Ivy’s tyrants, by their very destructiveness, breed little pockets of resistance. Courage, tolerance, sweetness, sanity and understanding spring up everywhere. Romantic love may be outside her compass (though never the misdeeds committed for love’s sake). But no writer has made more of the affections that bind across the generations …’

Ultimately, as Hilary Spurling sagely judges, Ivy’s work is compassionate, if only because knowing the worst she is able to comprehend the best. There is, when all is said about her sharpness and cynical eye, a warmth in her, a response to the warmth in others and to the innocents at heart (how engaging are the children in her books) which she expressed in her own response to her friends. After enduring thirty-five years of turmoil and her ‘smash’ (Noel’s death), she came through with all her best responsive qualities to the joy of life, which is not to say that she was less observant of the frailties. In fact, as I myself discovered at a perilous time (which Hilary Spurling writes about), Ivy was tender to a weakness. Possibly she considered that a flaw felt was an asset. Her tyrants had flaws which they never admitted, in her view the greater weakness. She herself – both in her life and work – admitted all the conflicting nuances. She noted them and used them as passionately as she tended her balcony garden, dead-heading and pruning so that the final bloom was a perfection of its kind. What she cherished most was truth, even though this might prove unpleasant. She had a weakness for a lie which she was able instantly to detect, and was hugely entertained by her fellows. She knew how to hold onto life, as she wrote at the end to Francis King: ‘It is better to be drunk with loss and to beat the ground, than to let deeper things gradually escape.’

From my personal knowledge of Ivy and her work and from this biography I judge that nothing escaped her. And little, clearly, has escaped Hilary Spurling’s comprehension. Secrets of a Woman’s Heart is magnificent, magical almost, a great achievement. How fortunate Ivy is, in retrospect, to have found a biographer of such intelligent and imaginative understanding. If, she said to me, ‘I wrote an autobiography, a really good one, and put myself into it. I think it would be very interesting and I think I should do it very well.’ Substitute biography for autobiography and you have Hilary Spurling’s masterpiece.