The world that [Miss Compton-Burnett and Jane Austen] depict is normally a limited one, the families at the big house, the rectory, and one or two other houses in an English village….

Why has [Miss Compton-Burnett] chosen this world, and why has she dated the action of her books some time between 1888 and 1902?

Not out of a desire to imitate—Jane Austen is inimitable, and Miss Compton-Burnett has a very original mind. Nor has she acted out of nostalgia for a quiet, old-fashioned world: there is nothing quaint about her work, any more than there is about Miss Austen's—no period properties and no local colour.

She herself claims that she is accepting her limitations: 'I do not feel that I have any real or organic knowledge of life later than about 1910. I should not write of later times with enough grasp or confidence…. When an age is...