Anita Brookner, at 80, knew that, were any biographer to delve too deeply into her private affairs, her literature would be ruined. The work was one thing, matters of the heart quite another. In both of her distinguished careers, first as an art historian, then as a so-called ‘lady novelist’, she had found it advisable to keep her authentic self at one remove from her storied accomplishments, and she saw no reason for this division – the personal set apart from the sombrely professional – not to endure beyond her death.
She determined, therefore, to thwart any attempt at biography by, wherever possible, erasing all evidence of her existence beyond the collections held in university archives and the fading recollections of contemporaries, family and friends. Let time be her judge, not a busy and presumptuous writer scouting for material. ‘I have no private papers,’ she had informed an interviewer some years earlier. ‘I shall leave no trace. That’s the ideal.’ Now, as the end of her life approached, this ideal state was close to being realised.
Spare a thought, then, for Hermione Lee. Having undertaken to produce an authorised account of Brookner’s life, for publication a decade after the author’s death at 87, she experienced what may be described as biographer’s remorse:
