Anita Brookner by Hermione Lee review – an enigmatic literary great given her due

A tireless account shines a light on the Booker-winning author’s mysterious early years and the undeserved criticism that accompanied with her success ‘Dr 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.

Continue reading...