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500 The twentieth century: 1945 to the present<br />

an enclosed world somewhere before the First World War. The author’s<br />

own life had been severely marked by the war and her novels examine<br />

how ‘nothing is so corrupting as power’ in the deceptively calm and<br />

well-ordered society that E.M. Forster also portrays. But Ivy Compton-<br />

Burnett’s novels are more frequently compared with post-Impressionism<br />

in painting than with the literary fashions of the time. They exude an<br />

air of gloom and crime, from the first Pastors and Masters (1925) to<br />

later work such as Manservant and Maidservant (1947), which recalls<br />

the corruption expressed in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, and The<br />

Present and the Past (1953). She reveals, as T.S. Eliot put it in another<br />

context, ‘the skull beneath the skin’ of late Victorian and Edwardian<br />

society.<br />

‘Poor Father!’ said Toby suddenly.<br />

‘Yes, poor Father!’ said Cassius. ‘Toby’s poor old father! But Toby<br />

loves him, doesn’t he?’<br />

‘No. Oh, yes, poor Father!’<br />

‘And Father loves his Toby.’<br />

‘Yes, dear little boy.’<br />

‘And dear Father.’<br />

‘No, dear Toby.’<br />

‘Will you two elder boys come for a walk with me?’<br />

‘Yes,’ said Guy, approaching him.<br />

‘We were going for a walk with Mother,’ said Fabian.<br />

‘Well, which do you want to do?’<br />

‘Well, we had arranged to go with Mother.’<br />

‘Did you know that, Guy?’ said Cassius.<br />

‘No. Yes. Yes, I did.’<br />

‘You are as bad as Toby.’<br />

‘Or as good,’ said Flavia. ‘They both tried to give you what you<br />

wanted.’<br />

‘Oh, I don’t want scraps of attention thrown to me, as if I were a<br />

beggar in their path. What a way to regard their father! I am<br />

content to go my own way, communing with myself. It may be<br />

the best companionship.’<br />

‘It is the only kind we have,’ said Henry.

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