The Brooknerian

There are secrets for privacy and silence; let them only be cultivated on the part of the hunted creature with even half the method with which the love of sport - or call it the historic sense - is cultivated on the part of the investigator… Then at last the game will be fair and the two forces face to face; it will be 'pull devil, pull tailor,' and the hardest pull will doubtless constitute the happiest result. Then the cunning of the inquirer, envenomed with resistance, will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we to-day conceive, and the pale forewarned victim, with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered, will, in the tower of art, the invulnerable granite, stand, without a sally, the siege of all the years. 'She and He: recent documents': essay by Henry James on George Sand, 1897 Samuel Johnson was 53 years old when he met his future biographer James Boswell. For the next twenty or so years, Boswell developed a close friendship with h...

‘Brookner’ was a thing to live up to, even for Anita Brookner, a formal elegance, a field of intelligence, which conditioned both her life and her art. An long, extraordinary review from Andrew O'Hagan in the LRB - see here . O'Hagan is the author of the very fine Caledonian Road , and on the BBC Radio 4 show Take Four Books he cited The Princess Casamassima as an influence. Brookner would have approved.

...now her account is closed the novels may be seen for what they are: a literary chronicle of life's journey from middle to old age... If this sounds unexpectedly Proustian in scope, it shows how ill-served she was by her detractors and the orthodoxies of the sales cycle. Andy Miller's review of the Brookner biography in this week's Spectator is the one I've been waiting for. It's no exaggeration to credit dedicated readers such as Andy Miller with the reassessment of Brookner's literary reputation in the decade since her death. I'd suggest it's the tireless curatorial and promotional work of Miller and other influential fans that permitted a biographer of Hermione Lee's stature to consider adding Anita Brookner to her list of illustrious subjects. Authors usually take a posthumous dip in popularity and visibility; some never recover. It took Henry James more than half a century to find his readership. That Brookner is now being taken so seriously,...

(But we noticed, we might rejoin.) We continue our selection of British reviews of the Brookner biography: see the Literary Review here . The cover is of interest too.

Series 5 of the BBC's A House through Time,  available on the iPlayer in the UK, features Montagu Mansions, home to Claire Pitt in Undue Influence. The first UK edition of the novel shows the location on the cover.

It is hardly surprising that even such an eminent life-writer as Lee might wonder whether Brookner would have given this book her blessing. Brookner was as secretive as a heron. The fine mystery of the writer, to quote Dickens on Shakespeare, must surely be left undisturbed. ー From an excellent review ( here ) by Laura Cumming in the Observer of Hermione Lee's forthcoming biography.

In a post a while back ( here ), I recalled pitching unsuccessfully a volume of Brookner's essays... *** Anita Brookner Mme de Blazac and I: Memoirs, Essays and Reviews 1981-2011 1.      ‘Mme de Blazac’, memoir, LRB , 19 June 1997 2.      On Abel Gance’s film Napoleon, film review, LRB , 16 April 1981 3.      ‘The Bibliotheque Nationale’, essay/memoir, TLS , 5 October 1984 4.      ‘The People and the Place’, review of Parisians by Graham Robb, Spectator , 10 April 2010 5.      ‘Repose is Taboo’d by Anxiety’, review of Migraine by Oliver Sacks, Spectator , 23 October 1993 6.      ‘Even Less Fiction than Stranger ’, review of Le Premier Homme by Albert Camus, Spectator , 14 May 1994 7.      ‘The Master of the Indirect’, review of Henry James: Collected Stories , Spectator , 11 Dec 1999 8.      ‘Sexual Tour...