This exhaustive biography of the Booker winner brings her properly out of the shadows for the first time
‘D
r Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.”
The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.
Born in 1928 and raised in south London by a fearsome Polish-Jewish grandmother and absurdly ineffectual parents (a tobacco salesman and a failed singer), Brookner was a highly academic only child. After a degree at King’s College London, she briefly tasted freedom as a student in Paris, but was soon dragged back to care for her extraordinarily needy mother. Yoked to home for the next decade, she managed, nevertheless, to become a brilliant art critic and a charismatic lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where she stayed until retirement.
