About

Welcome to THE BROOKNERIAN.

The Brooknerian is a personal blog, a digital archive and a literary journal celebrating the life and work of Dr Anita Brookner (1928-2016), Booker Prize-winning novelist and renowned art historian.

The Booker win notwithstanding, Brookner was often miscategorised during her lifetime, dismissed as small, genteel: 'the dead end of English literature', as one critic put it.

More perceptive readers, then and now, identify in Brookner a unique voice and a sensibility extending far beyond the time and place the writer inhabited.

Particularly prized is the dark glamour of her mandarin prose, unlike anything else in contemporary fiction.

The Brooknerian is curated space for:

accessible literary analysis of Brookner’s two-dozen novels;
examination of Brookner’s work in art criticism and history;
consideration of the Brookner aesthetic, the guidance implicit in her work on how to live;
Brookneriana of all kinds; and
discussion of Brookner intertexts, from Henry James to Stendhal.

Over a number of years, the blog has proved a resource to thousands of readers - from Brookner newbies to students reading the author as part of their studies.

About me

I'm an Englishman living in Bridport, Dorset. My lifelong interest in Dr Brookner's work stems from a random encounter with Hotel du Lac in a public library at the age of eighteen and a not-so-chance meeting with the author herself in a London street a few years later. The glitter of her prose, the radical nature of her themes, and the depth of her erudition continue to dazzle and nurture me nearly forty years later.

But art, as she said, doesn't love you and will not console you...

I use the nom de plume Tom Sabine, and my profile picture, by Géricault, seen on the cover of Brookner's essay collection Soundings, is to be viewed in the flesh in a highly Brooknerian museum in Ghent.

Contact

I love hearing from fellow readers and researchers. If you have a comment or question about Anita Brookner, or anything on the blog, please contact me:

through the Contact Form (see sidebar);
by leaving a comment under one of the posts (there will be a short delay before publication, as comments are moderated); or
by emailing brooknerian@gmail.com

Comments

Top Ten Brookner

The much-loved Backlisted podcast ( here ) returns with a 'lockdown' episode that includes a lot of Anita Brookner talk. Prompted by discussion about Hotel du Lac , never the most representative Brookner, the chat meanders pleasantly on to the potential for compiling an Anita Brookner 'Top Ten'. At a loose end myself, though this week at the chalkface entertaining the children of keyworkers, I considered the question myself. I'm sure there are similar such lists elsewhere on this blog - I forget, and I don't particularly want to consult them anyhow. Of course, Brookner - like Henry James, like Trollope, indeed like many prolific authors - passed through phases. Brookner's novels, I contend, fall into three, neatly divided by the decades she wrote in: the raw, vital 80s; the settled magisterial 90s; the bleak, experimental 2000s. A Brookner novel from the 80s seems very different from any of her final works - just as 'James I', 'James II' ...

'Proustian in scope'

...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,...

A Thing to Live up to

‘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.

'Spikier, sharper, cooler than anyone had noticed'

(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.

Secretive as a Heron

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.

Brookner Biography Announced

A brief post to let Brooknerians know the moment has arrived: a biography commissioned by Chatto & Windus, to be written by Hermione Lee. Hermione Lee interviewed Brookner on television in the 80s. Brookner joins illustrious company. Lee has lifed, among others, Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.

Montagu Mansions

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.

Further Soundings #2

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...

Christopher Hampton's Hotel du Lac

However often I watch it, I'm always surprised. A film of an Anita Brookner novel seems as outlandish as an adaptation of, say, late James. But The Golden Bowl and, more skilfully, The Wings of the Dove have been successfully translated to the screen in recent decades. Their plots, though, underneath the verbiage, are very simple, even sensational. Hotel du Lac , similarly, is one of Brookner's more structured, plotted works. Rights to the novel were bought before its Booker success. Initially Anita Brookner had been approached to write an original screenplay, but she said she wouldn't know how to. Instead she offered the soon-to-be published Hotel du Lac . (This is revealed in the 2002 commentary that accompanies the DVD of the 1986 TV film. The commentary is a dull, low-powered affair. No Brookner, of course.) Anna Massey plays Edith. I've often found Massey a distractingly distinctive actor. Like Judi Dench she manages somehow, in any role, alwa...

A Challenging and Absorbing Task

On the tenth anniversary of Anita Brookner's death, Hermione Lee gives an insightful portrait of the author (see here ). Professor Lee's forthcoming biography was an exercise in life-writing not without its difficulties: Brookner was an intensely private person who made away with most of her archive, kept her friends in separate compartments, and had secrets she never revealed.

The Brooknerian

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