Introduction

Ivy Compton-Burnett, from whose second novel this extract is taken, invariably set her stories at the end of the nineteenth century or the beginning of this one. The conversation suggests fairly enough Jane Austen's reputation at the time: she was admired by a literary elite, including Tennyson, Macaulay, George Lewes and George Eliot; she was despised by the solemn, the pompous, the obtuse and the humourless. But she was also enjoyed by very many who found in her an assured and reassuring world for escape from the restless questionings of their own.