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
Literary responses Deborah Moggach
This was the only one of DM 's books that her father disliked—a reaction caused by his fear of its being biographically interpreted.
Miller, Lucasta. “The home front”. The Guardian, 19 May 2007, p. 11.
11
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Galen Swanson , expressed admiration for...
Literary responses Muriel Spark
Her friend Graham Greene hastened to offer his usual compliment of best-since-Memento Mori—this time after reading only the first three pages.
Greene, Graham. Graham Greene. A Life in Letters. Editor Greene, Richard, Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.
399
Claire Tomalin called it a novel about a hate affair...
Literary responses Lettice Cooper
The Persephone reprint of 2004 provided a recuperation opportunity for reviewers. The Guardian reviewer saw the book as a forerunner of Anita Brookner , and wrote that although it is clear where Cooper's sympathies lie...
Literary responses Michèle Roberts
On reaching paperback this book was panned both in the Independent by Murrough O'Brien and in the Guardian by A. H.. O'Brien wrote, The story is marvellous, but the prose often nods. ....
Literary responses Edna O'Brien
Reviews of this novel were mixed. Anita Brookner expressed in the Spectator the view that O'Brien had failed to live up to her usual standard.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Carol Shields wrote in the Globe and Mail:...
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...
Occupation Honoré de Balzac
Mary Russell Mitford translated some of Balzac's works. His oeuvre influenced many writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon , Storm Jameson , and Natalie Clifford Barney , and has attracted criticism from Anita Brookner .
Publishing Margaret Kennedy
Initial sales of the novel were slow but by the new year it was being widely read and the author had attained celebrity status. Almost instantly, she began working on a stage adaptation, which was...
Publishing Edith Templeton
This novel appeared in the USA as Proper Bohemians. The 1985 Hogarth Press edition retains the original title and has an introduction by Anita Brookner .
Publishing Margaret Kennedy
This novel has seen many subsequent editions, including a 1985 reprint in Virago 's Modern Classics series, for which Anita Brookner again wrote the introduction.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Brookner, Anita. Look at Me. Jonathan Cape, 1983.
Brookner, Anita. Providence. Jonathan Cape, 1982.
Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents. Viking, 2000.
Brookner, Anita. Soundings. Harvill Press, 1997.
Brookner, Anita. Strangers. Penguin, 2009.
Templeton, Edith, and Anita Brookner. Summer in the Country. Hogarth Press, 1985.
Brookner, Anita. The Bay of Angels. Viking, 2001.
Kennedy, Margaret, and Anita Brookner. The Constant Nymph. Virago, 1983.
Brookner, Anita. The Genius of the Future. Phaidon, 1971.
Templeton, Edith, and Anita Brookner. The Island of Desire. Hogarth Press, 1985, http://U of A HSS.
Brookner, Anita. “The Loneliness of Miss Pym”. Sunday Times, p. 45.
Brookner, Anita. The Next Big Thing. Viking, 2002.
Brookner, Anita. “The return of the earth mother”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4013, p. 202.
Brookner, Anita. Undue Influence. Viking, 1999.
Brookner, Anita. Visitors. Jonathan Cape, 1997.
Brookner, Anita. “We have stood apart studiously”. The Spectator, Vol.
274
, No. 8695, pp. 36-7.