Born June 5: Compton-Burnett, Orman, Keynes

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools: lesbians have More Women Than Men (1933) and gay men  get Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949).

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream, a NYT #1 bestseller. She does not invest in

the stock market. In 2007 she came out in a New York Times interview, noting the unfair tax burdens that same-sex couples shoulder. In 2008 and 2009, she was named one of the Time 100, and in 2010 she was one of Forbes' most powerful women in the world. She married her longtime partner and co-producer of her show, Kathy Travis, in a ceremony in South Africa. She's 63.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activKeynes_2ity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.