The Brooknerian

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/

As noted in a recent post ( here ), I'm fond of Professor Emma Smith's lecture series on Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Highbrow but accessible, these talks contribute to our continued appreciation of early-modern drama. Professor Smith builds on the curatorial work of commentators over the years, not least in the eighteenth century, when Johnson, Pope and the Shakespeare Ladies Club argued for the preeminence and rehabilitation of the 'Bard'. Professor Smith extends her mission through popular media, appearing regularly on literary podcasts. In one such, on being asked why she loves Shakespeare, Professor Smith responds, Do I? Do I really love Shakespeare? She goes on: Shakespeare is a thing to think with. I adore the conversations it makes possible. A thing to think with . It's a thought-provoking remark, relevant to fandoms of all kinds. It helps me understand my own 'love' of Brookner. I don't read her all the time. I have many other interests. ...

An interior hermetically sealed, a tilted head, a clock just edging beyond a quarter past one, a whole afternoon to be got through... The National Portrait Gallery in London houses five photographs of Anita Brookner ( here ), each of which repays close attention. Anita Brookner by Lucy Anne Dickens The most extreme of Brookner portraits. It is one of a series of photos of art establishment figures from the early 2000s. Each is formal and carefully staged; none is as austere. Lucy Dickens said of the project, 'I am immensely grateful to those who agreed to sit for me, despite the pressures on their time, and in some cases, old age or infirmity. I was met unfailingly with courtesy (and often fish pie).' The only references to Brookner's former career are the pictures on the walls, somewhat artlessly placed. We know Brookner owned an etching by Manet of Baudelaire, and a few watercolours by Edward Lear. The picture on the left has the air of a Watteau. Brookner has a pile of ...

I can't recommend highly enough Professor Emma Smith's podcast lecture series on Shakespeare ( here ). Emma Smith is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford. She is an active and generous academic whose insights can be enjoyed further on YouTube and on radio programmes like In Our Time . Throughout her lectures Professor Smith poses questions about critical response, genre, style, and intertextuality, all topics of wider relevance. She encourages her students to use their enthusiasms in their work, licensing them to seek comparisons and contrasts between early-modern drama and apparently unrelated cultural phenomena. In her lecture on The Tempest , she says: One association of cultural or aesthetic lateness is as a decline from earlier achievement or prowess . W e might think : Thomas Hardy, Ben Jonson, Alfred Hitchcock, Lady Gaga, Kenneth Branagh, artists who go off rather than on . It sets me thinking. What of Brookner? The first thing to note is that Bro...

Anita Brookner used epigraphs sparingly - in Family and Friends (Goethe), A Closed Eye (James) and Strangers (Freud). The epigraph of her 1991 novel A Closed Eye is a quote from an early Henry James tale called Madame de Mauves (1874).* I have two questions: Which text did Brookner use, and where did she find it? With James, there is often a question of texts. James (unlike Brookner) was an inveterate reviser. He would make minor changes to works between magazine and book publication. And years later, for the New York Edition (1907-9), he reread and substantially revised most of his oeuvre, making significant alterations at the level of the word and sentence to early works like Madame de Mauves . Brookner quotes from the original 1874 version: She strikes me as a person who is begging off from full knowledge, - who has struck a truce with painful truth, and is trying awhile the experiment of living with closed eyes. The New York Edition version (Volume 13) reads: She strikes me as a...