The life, work, novels and intertexts of Anita Brookner
The new Penguin paperback edition of Strangers (2009), with its introduction by Tessa Hadley (see here ) and its thick gatefold or French fold cover, is an opulent affair. Oddly, its livery is distinct from other recent reissues, instead mimicking an earlier version of Hotel du Lac . Of interest is the inclusion of an author photograph. It's a shot from a 1986 set by Peter Jordan. It's the session…
Val Hennessey's interview with Anita Brookner in You Magazine, 9 August 1987, marks the publication of Brookner's seventh novel A Friend from England . The piece, 'Babbling with Brookner', anticipates Julian Barnes's warning to a later interviewer: 'You will find yourself babbling'. Hennessey is a fan, Brookner her 'literary heroine'. She once bumped into Brookner outside Waitrose and said…
1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London. The walk, which extends over a whole chapter, as if in real time, is harrowing: it's one of the most abject episodes in Brookner. A nocturnal traipse of a different kind occurs towards the end of George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel . The hero, as emotionally turbulent as Brookner's protagonist, though for different…
'[B]y the paradox implicit in achieved art', Brookner makes her protagonists' predicaments as satisfying as poetry: this was John Bayley's judgement on A Private View in the Spectator in 1994. Tessa Hadley, another Brookner enthusiast or apologist, makes a similar point in her excellent new introduction to Brookner's last novel, Strangers (see here ): Describing the novels in bald terms of plot…
When, a few years ago, an early-modern manuscript translation of Tacitus was discovered in Lambeth Palace, the writer's identity was at first a mystery (see here ). The piece was in the neat hand of a scribe, but scribbled marginal corrections gave clues as to the translator: Queen Elizabeth I herself, whose late penmanship was notoriously appalling. Chirographic disregard for the reader was a…
Further to recent posts on Brookner photographs and harder-to-find images in particular, I offer this from The Times , June, 1994: John Voos's portrait accompanies a review of A Private View . The piece, by Philip Howard, is often quoted: 'Anita Brookner is our Henry James'. By way of a title, a line from Browning - 'When the long dark evenings come' - completes an excellent evaluation of one of…
Is Brookner our contemporary? It might be a strange question to ask of a writer active so recently, whose last work of fiction was published in 2011. But even then there was less labelling, less ready codification of social and emotional malaise. In 2011 we heard talk of mental health less often, though not quite as infrequently as in 1981, when Brookner's first novel came out. Hermione Lee,…
She rarely gives interviews... Such would be the excited refrain any time a journalist did breach the walls of the Courtauld Institute or the flat in Elm Park Gardens. Anita Brookner was interviewed in print only a handful of times, mostly in the 1980s, possibly once in the 90s, and twice in the 2000s. She featured in broadcast media hardly ever: on TV a few times around the time of the Booker…
In a recent post ( here ), I pointed to Anita Brookner's prolific, largely uncurated journalistic output. Serendipity presents me today with a piece on Géricault from September, 1983 ( here ). The date, as will become clear at the end of this post, is significant. Like many of Brookner's art-history reviews, this New Criterion essay is less a review of the book under consideration than a wider…
Continuing a series on the 2026 rebrand: Two further cover images have been added to booksellers' websites. I was expecting something similar to the new Strangers ( here ). These, however, reuse the black-and-white photos of ten years ago. In this significant year for Brookner, I hoped for the sort of uniform branding enjoyed by Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and others. Brookner's prolificity will…
Announced this week, an event in September at Topping and Company, Bath: Hermione Lee discusses her upcoming biography of Anita Brookner. https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath/hermione-lee/
As noted in a recent post ( here ), I'm fond of Professor Emma Smith's lecture series on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Highbrow but accessible, these talks contribute to our continued appreciation of early-modern drama. Professor Smith builds on the curatorial work of commentators over the years, not least in the eighteenth century, when Johnson, Pope and the Shakespeare Ladies Club argued…
An interior hermetically sealed, a tilted head, a clock just edging beyond a quarter past one, a whole afternoon to be got through... The National Portrait Gallery in London houses five photographs of Anita Brookner ( here ), each of which repays close attention. Anita Brookner by Lucy Anne Dickens The most extreme of Brookner portraits. It is one of a series of photos of art establishment figures…
I can't recommend highly enough Professor Emma Smith's podcast lecture series on Shakespeare ( here ). Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. She is an active and generous academic whose insights can be enjoyed further on YouTube and on radio programmes like In Our Time . Throughout her lectures Professor Smith poses questions about critical response, genre,…
Anita Brookner used epigraphs sparingly - in Family and Friends (Goethe), A Closed Eye (James) and Strangers (Freud). The epigraph of her 1991 novel A Closed Eye is a quote from an early Henry James tale called Madame de Mauves (1874).* I have two questions: Which text did Brookner use, and where did she find it? With James, there is often a question of texts. James (unlike Brookner) was an…
This may, by now, come as a surprise, but Brookner was once disregarded, downgraded and even mocked by her peers. For illustration, consider the comments of Jeanette Winterson ( here ) and Anthony Burgess ( here ). Why the hostility? Coming to fiction after a successful career elsewhere, was Brookner seen as an interloper, a hobbyist, straying from her lane? Something has changed. Time has passed.…
In an earlier post I asked: In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith? Answer: Look at Me (1983): I had already got Olivia's Christmas present, a first edition of The Ordeal of Richard Feveral [ sic* ], her favourite novel, and I also saw the smile that would break up her little face when I gave it to her. (Ch. 5) The antagonist Alix pooh-poohs…
In yesterday's Telegraph features magazine, Mick Brown was one of the contributors to a piece called 'The celebrities who are actually nice ... and those who aren't' (available here ). Mick Brown interviewed Anita Brookner in 2009 in what was to be her last interview. It is an often-cited exchange and very fine (available behind the Telegraph 's paywall). In Brown's recollection, Brookner was 'one…
Quiz question requiring deep-cut Brooknerian knowledge: In which novel by Anita Brookner is there a reference to the Victorian novelist George Meredith? (Answer in a few days)
Previously hidden away in a book of 1985, Novelists in Interview , John Haffenden's interview with Anita Brookner is, I find, now available online ( here ). It is a an extraordinary exchange, brilliantly orchestrated by Haffenden, better known as the editor of T. S. Eliot's letters. Interviewer and subject fence smartly and with dazzle. Brookner's responses, aperçus astonishing in their…
Brookner was a reviewer and an essayist long before she picked up her pen to write fiction. As an established academic, she was a go-to for editors in search of a piece on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, French painting in particular. From the 1980s onwards, by then a novelist, Brookner's focus was more on fiction and literary biography. She appeared in the Observer , the Telegraph ,…
In a much earlier post I lamented the unavailability of Anita Brookner's contribution to the 100 Great Paintings series (BBC, 1981). During the time I was away from the blog, the BBC reshowed the episode, and it has now found its way to YouTube:
The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon (see here ) remembers: When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special subject was French painting of the Romantic period, but it was her approach to art in general that I found enlightening, and eye-opening. I remember one of her instructions in particular: 'Always…
Further to earlier posts ( here and here ) on Brookner's writing style, I note a review from 2009 of Strangers in the Oxford Mail (see here ): Since the perfection of her grammar and use of language is a subject often commented on by reviewers ('Brookner’s writing is meticulous, impeccable and full of simple grace,' Sunday Times ) I cannot resist pointing out that on the evidence of Strangers she…
Further to my post of last week :