One or two of the critics who, in the late Eighties and early Nineties, trashed Brookner, came round to her in the end. Having been misunderstood as genteel and parochial, and bracketed with Jane Austen and Barbara Pym, Brookner's wider credentials, in the new century, were beginning to be appreciated. But it was too late.
Critics began to speak of her as a European writer. Mark Lawson, on reading Strangers, penned a full recantation. He had been one of those young men in the 1980s who had so disdained the likes of A Misalliance and Lewis Percy. Now, older, he 'got' her at last, suggesting she be placed alongside no less a luminary than Samuel Beckett. High praise indeed.
Link to Lawson review
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