Anita Brookner

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Standard Name: Brookner, Anita
Birth Name: Anita Brookner
AB began publishing as an academic translator, art historian, and book reviewer in the 1960s and 70s, but became far better known for her novels. She was fifty when her first work of fiction appeared; after that they followed in astonishingly rapid succession to the number of twenty-four, passing equally rapidly into paperback. She was both popular and on the whole critically respected, yet she attracted from some reviewers a strain of virulently hostile comment.
Close-up portrait of Anita Brooker, seated with her hands under her chin, in front of bookshelves at her home in Chelsea, London, 18 September 1989.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Edith Templeton
In 1984 the novelist Anita Brookner met ET at Bordighera. After their meeting, according to Templeton, they corresponded until the friendship was broken by Templeton's shock at discovering that Brookner had trained with Anthony Blunt
Friends, Associates Rosamond Lehmann
In her final decade RL 's old friends found her difficult and demanding; but the rediscovery of her novels brought her the pleasure of young friends: publisher Carmen Callil , novelist Anita Brookner , and...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
Literary responses Jane Gardam
JG continued to attract prizes in her new genre. This work was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 won the Baudelaire Prize in France.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
JG 's father's response to her Booker short-listing...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
In a negative review in the Sunday Times (headed The Loneliness of Miss Pym), Anita Brookner described Pym's tone and characterizations as coldly detached and reductive, and complained of a determined sexlessness of the...
Literary responses Mary Wesley
Anita Brookner 's review in the Spectator must have been a blow: she likened Wesley's work to that of Catherine Cookson and Agatha Christie , calling it stereotyped, nostalgic, reassuring, romantic, tasteful, well-bred, very slight...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Literary responses Fay Weldon
Anita Brookner , in the Times Literary Supplement in 1980, called FWone of the most astute and distinctive women writing fiction today,
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981–2024, Numerous volumes.
63: 444
while writer John Braine has called her a natural novelist.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research, 1982–1983.
14: 759
Literary responses Maggie Gee
The cover of the paperback edition quotes Anita Brookner in The Spectator saying I read it twice, and it was even better the second time, and Jeanette Winterson in the Sunday Times saying it was...
Literary responses Fay Weldon
Reviewers had mixed responses: Anita Brookner thought there would be anger at the way the novel turns away from the goal of equality with men to assert that female destiny is bodily and maternal.
Brookner, Anita. “The return of the earth mother”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4013, 22 Feb. 2009, p. 202.
202
Literary responses Germaine Greer
Greer professed herself deeply anxious about the reviews.
Wallace, Christine. Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew. Richard Cohen Books, 1999.
193
The Penguin paperback edition, however, quoted on its cover Anita Brookner in the Observer calling this a brave book,Anthony Storr in the Independent describing it...
Literary responses Edith Templeton
While some reviewers criticised this novel as superficial, the New York Times found in it a brisk but sympathetic discourse upon human folly and the blind fanaticism of people determined to preserve an outmoded way...
Literary responses Margaret Kennedy
Brookner calls Troy Chimneys a disconcerting novel because of its occasionally puzzling arrangment and the oblique. . . manner in which it is told.
Brookner, Anita, and Margaret Kennedy. “Introduction”. Troy Chimneys, Virago, 1985, p. vii - x.
vii, ix, x
It won, nevertheless, the 1953 James Tait Black...
Literary responses Edith Templeton
Brookner says that in this novel ET was trying to entertain the English without frightening them.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. Living on Yesterday, Hogarth Press, 1986.
Literary responses Doris Lessing
This novel was, however, highly and perceptively praised by Anita Brookner in a retrospective review reprinted in her Soundings, 1997. The Royal Swedish Academy in 2007 called it one of the handful of books...

Timeline

January 1996: Novelist Kate Mosse and a committee of literary...

Women writers item

January 1996

Novelist Kate Mosse and a committee of literary professionals established the Orange Prize for Fiction (later the Baileys Prize, now the Women's Proze for Fiction), a literary prize to be solely awarded to and judged...

Texts

Brookner, Anita. A Closed Eye. Random House, 1991.
Brookner, Anita. A Closed Eye. Jonathan Cape, 1991.
Brookner, Anita. A Family Romance. Jonathan Cape, 1993.
Brookner, Anita. A Friend from England. Jonathan Cape, 1987.
Brookner, Anita. A Misalliance. Jonathan Cape, 1986.
Brookner, Anita. A Private View. Jonathan Cape, 1994.
Brookner, Anita. A Start in Life. Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Brookner, Anita. Altered States. Jonathan Cape, 1996.
Brookner, Anita. Brief Lives. Jonathan Cape, 1990.
Brookner, Anita. Falling Slowly. Viking, 1998.
Brookner, Anita. Falling Slowly. Random House, 1988.
Brookner, Anita. Family and Friends. Jonathan Cape, 1985.
Brookner, Anita. Fraud. Jonathan Cape, 1992.
Brookner, Anita. Hotel du Lac. Jonathan Cape, 1984.
Brookner, Anita. Incidents in the Rue Laugier. Jonathan Cape, 1995.
Brookner, Anita. Incidents in the Rue Laugier. Random House, 1996.
Brookner, Anita, and Margaret Kennedy. “Introduction”. The Constant Nymph, Virago, 1983, p. ix - xiv.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. Summer in the Country, Hogarth Press, 1985.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. The Island of Desire, Hogarth Press, 1985.
Brookner, Anita, and Margaret Kennedy. “Introduction”. Troy Chimneys, Virago, 1985, p. vii - x.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. Living on Yesterday, Hogarth Press, 1986.
Brookner, Anita. J. A. Dominique Ingres. Purnell, 1965.
Brookner, Anita. Latecomers. Jonathan Cape, 1988.
Brookner, Anita. Latecomers. Grafton, 1989.
Brookner, Anita. Lewis Percy. Jonathan Cape, 1989.