The Brooknerian

When, a few years ago, an early-modern manuscript translation of Tacitus was discovered in Lambeth Palace, the writer's identity was at first a mystery (see here ). The piece was in the neat hand of a scribe, but scribbled marginal corrections gave clues as to the translator: Queen Elizabeth I herself, whose late penmanship was notoriously appalling. Chirographic disregard for the reader was a marker of status in the period, and Elizabeth's ministers would provide fair-copy transcriptions of her correspondence. Brookner's handwriting, though more even and consistent than Elizabeth's, or indeed late Henry James's, is also difficult to read. It's the kind of script you have to take a run at, letting the likely sense carry you forward. On AbeBooks at present, an autograph letter to a reader: These things show up from time to time. I own two myself (see here  and here ). Brookner corresponded willingly but guardedly with her fans. The present letter, to a Mrs Chappe...

Further to recent posts on Brookner photographs and harder-to-find images in particular, I offer this from The Times , June, 1994: John Voos's portrait accompanies a review of A Private View . The piece, by Philip Howard, is often quoted: 'Anita Brookner is our Henry James'. By way of a title, a line from Browning - 'When the long dark evenings come' - completes an excellent evaluation of one of Brookner's finest novels. The photo is an oddity in the oeuvre: Brookner in the act of speaking. Was it posed? Was it taken at an event? The blurred background suggests the familiar setting of Brookner's London flat. The hard undeceived wistfulness of her gaze, the precision of her discourse, the discontented romanticism of her outlook are all captured by a master photographer.

Is Brookner our contemporary? It might be a strange question to ask of a writer active so recently, whose last work of fiction was published in 2011. But even then there was less labelling, less ready codification of social and emotional malaise. In 2011 we heard talk of mental health less often, though not quite as infrequently as in 1981, when Brookner's first novel came out. Hermione Lee, Brookner's later biographer, offers an insightful, psychoanalytical review ( here ) of A Friend from England , one of Brookner's 1980s novels, inexplicably now out of print. Though the protagonist, Rachel, hasn't read Freud, 'Freud,' says Lee, 'would have wanted to read her': [S]he is an extreme case in the Brookner hospital, off in her own isolation ward. Time and again Brookner's characters worry the reader. Nominatively determined Herz, in The Next Big Thing , endures cardiac discomfort, but his visit to his GP baffles the harassed young doctor, with talk of F...

She rarely gives interviews... Such would be the excited refrain any time a journalist did breach the walls of the Courtauld Institute or the flat in Elm Park Gardens. Anita Brookner was interviewed in print only a handful of times, mostly in the 1980s, possibly once in the 90s, and twice in the 2000s. She featured in broadcast media hardly ever: on TV a few times around the time of the Booker win, and on radio equally infrequently. As the Countess Olenska says of the van der Luydens in The Age of Innocence , Brookner kept herself rare . Her few exchanges with journalists were stagey, dandyish affairs, expressed in language as mandarin and radical as anything to be found in her fiction. As in her novels, repetition and variation drove the performance. The Brookner academic Peta Mayer has written about repetition in Brookner's interviews. We might also recall Herz in The Next Big Thing / Making Things Better and his fantasies about being interviewed by an infinitely sympathetic, in...

In a recent post ( here ), I pointed to Anita Brookner's prolific, largely uncurated journalistic output. Serendipity presents me today with a piece on Géricault from September, 1983 ( here ). The date, as will become clear at the end of this post, is significant. Like many of Brookner's art-history reviews, this New Criterion essay is less a review of the book under consideration than a wider discussion of the artist, his work and his life. Géricault is familiar ground for Brookner: her essay collection,  Soundings (1997), begins with the text of an excellent lecture Brookner gave on the artist at the Courtauld. But anything of Brookner's, however repetitious, is of value. Indeed it may be argued that in her repetitions, and the variations they allow, Brookner is most truly herself. Only Brookner could make this arresting, novelistic observation of a sketch ( Retour de Russie ) by Géricault in the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, DC: Here are two veterans of the Na...

Continuing a series on the 2026 rebrand: Two further cover images have been added to booksellers' websites. I was expecting something similar to the new Strangers ( here ). These, however, reuse the black-and-white photos of ten years ago. In this significant year for Brookner, I hoped for the sort of uniform branding enjoyed by Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and others. Brookner's prolificity will always be a problem for publishers. Several of the novels, A Misalliance  (see here ) in particular, may be lost for ever. But even Henry James, or Hardy, otherwise fairly completely in print, have their lost children. James's Confidence , anyone? (For which see here , if of interest.) 

Announced this week, an event in September at Topping and Company, Bath: Hermione Lee discusses her upcoming biography of Anita Brookner. https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/events/bath/hermione-lee/