Family Feeling
On 27 June at 6.00 pm, Palazzo Butera will host a lecture by Helen Charman (Clare College, University of Cambridge) devoted to Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century English literature.
The event marks the culmination of the first residency programme developed through a collaboration between Fondazione Palazzo Butera and the Estate of Ivy Compton-Burnett. The call for applications, launched in 2025, attracted an extraordinary level of interest, far exceeding expectations and confirming both the continuing relevance of Compton-Burnett’s work and the rich range of critical perspectives her novels continue to inspire.
A contemporary of Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, Compton-Burnett occupies a unique place in the literary landscape of her time. Her writing is distinguished by its sharp irony, the almost surgical precision of its dialogue, and its ability to depict apparently static family situations charged with underlying conflicts and power dynamics that emerge through conversations in which characters rarely say what they truly think.
Helen Charman’s lecture, entitled Family Feeling and delivered in English, will explore the figure of the governess in Ivy Compton-Burnett’s novels, with particular attention to A House and Its Head (1935) and Daughters and Sons (1937).
Drawing on the late nineteenth century preoccupation with the governess as a highly freighted figure, either lunatic or sexually deviant, as well as Compton-Burnett’s own idiosyncratic style of realism that builds inward from the periphery, the paper will suggest that, in the relentless scrutiny Compton-Burnett applies to the conventional family, the governesses are often the characters able to think most clearly; often they seem to be aligned with her own intention, articulated in several interviews over the course of her career, to write novels in the service of “the revelation of character”.
How might this be related to the fact that the private space of the mind was the only place a live-in governess had to and for herself? What does precarious domestic work to a character?
What forms of harm do families enact on their members, and what harm do they inflict on those who are adjacent to them, not of it but in it, still? What role does marriage play in these curious domestic labour relations?
What forms of sublimated desire does Compton-Burnett’s dialogue—the opposite of the free associative, psychoanalytically engaged prose of her contemporaries—contain? And how might this link to the complicated question of the governess’s relation to sexual desire—both her own and other people’s?
The lecture will explore these questions in order to illuminate the ways in which Compton-Burnett uses the figure of the governess as a privileged observer of the power dynamics, emotional tensions, and structures of desire that shape the modern family.
The lecture will be followed by a conversation with the English novelist Philip Hensher, one of the foremost contemporary scholars and advocates of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s work.
Admission is free, subject to availability. Advance booking is recommended for those wishing to secure a seat.
Thanks to the collaboration with Modus Vivendi bookshop, a selection of Ivy Compton-Burnett’s major works will also be available for purchase at the venue.
The evening will conclude with an aperitivo offered by the Estate of Ivy Compton-Burnett at Le Cattive Bistrot, providing an informal opportunity to continue the conversation and meet the event’s guests.
Helen Charman
Helen Charman teaches English Literature in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and is an Affiliate of the School of Critical Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research explores the intersections of literature, feminism, social history, and psychoanalysis from the nineteenth century to the present day.
She is the author of Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood (Penguin, 2024) and is currently working on Hothouse Freaks, a book on the cultural and literary history of the governess in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She regularly contributes to leading British literary and cultural publications, including The White Review, Frieze, and Art Review, and frequently speaks at international festivals and cultural institutions.
Philip Hensher
Philip Hensher is a British novelist, critic, and journalist. The author of numerous novels, essays, and short-story collections, he is widely regarded as one of the leading voices in contemporary English literature. He contributes regularly to major cultural publications and has taught creative writing and literature at several universities in the United Kingdom.
He has long maintained a deep interest in the work of Ivy Compton-Burnett and is among her most insightful interpreters and advocates, having played an important role in bringing her work to new generations of readers.