The Brooknerian

‘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...

I've been listening to a couple of Brookner audiobooks. Joanna David's take on The Rules of Engagement is competent, and her middle-class tones suit the character of the novel's narrator. But there's a complacency to her reading, too cosy for a novel as dark and late as this. Diana Quick is the ideal reader of  Undue Influence . Her accent is RP, but less strident than David's. Quick's tone has a lowered, falling quality, appropriate for this sad novel. There's also a slight accent, not traceable, possibly just the effect of clipping. There are other actresses who display this: Eleanor Bron, say, or Siân Phillips. Quick's is an older woman's voice. Claire, the narrator of Undue Influence , is meant to be twenty-nine. Yet her storytelling always feels as if long in retrospect, though the novel is set in the modern day. This isn't the only example in Brookner of an unsettling freewheeling as to chronology. There's no evidence of Anita Brookner...

The new Penguin paperback edition of Strangers (2009), with its introduction by Tessa Hadley (see here ) and its thick gatefold or French fold cover, is an opulent affair. Oddly, its livery is distinct from other recent reissues, instead mimicking an earlier version of Hotel du Lac . Of interest is the inclusion of an author photograph. It's a shot from a 1986 set by Peter Jordan. It's the session where Brookner sits at her dining table, a book open before her, bookshelves and peace lilies behind. She wears an open-necked cream blouse and a small wristwatch. Other shots from the session show Brookner holding her neck, leaning her chin on her hands, folding her arms, smiling, turning aside. The one chosen for Strangers is suitably equivocal - folded arms, slight turn of the head, left eyebrow slightly more raised than normal, downward-angled lips. It's the first time a photo of Brookner has appeared on a British edition since the hardback of Visitors in 1997, the last und...

Val Hennessey's interview with Anita Brookner in  You Magazine,  9 August 1987, marks the publication of Brookner's seventh novel  A Friend from England . The piece, 'Babbling with Brookner', anticipates Julian Barnes's warning to a later interviewer: 'You will find yourself babbling'. Hennessey is a fan, Brookner her 'literary heroine'. She once bumped into Brookner outside Waitrose and said embarrassing fannish things. Brookner 'stood shifting uneasily from foot to foot, wide-eyed and fearful, like a trapped hare'. Later they met by chance on a number 14 bus. Both Brookner and Hennessey were shopping for outfits, Brookner for 'something tweedy and dull': she gets off and is seen heading into The Scotch House, a purveyor of quality Scottish clothing. Hennessey phones Brookner to arrange an interview. Brookner expresses alarm and consternation: she finds interviews 'an ordeal'. On arrival Hennessey compliments Brookner on her ...

1983's Look at Me finishes with a night walk through London. The walk, which extends over a whole chapter, as if in real time, is harrowing: it's one of the most abject episodes in Brookner. A nocturnal traipse of a different kind occurs towards the end of George Meredith's 1859 novel The Ordeal of Richard Feverel . The hero, as emotionally turbulent as Brookner's protagonist, though for different reasons, moves through a forest in Germany, experiencing everything from dusk to dawn, with a tempest in between. The chapter is satirised in Forster's Howards End (1910). Leonard Bast, visiting the Schlegel sisters, expresses his admiration for Meredith's novel and describes his own emulation of Richard Feverel's night walk. The Schlegels are less enamoured. They know the novel, but find it laughable. They mock, for example, the glimmeringly drooping forest. Such different reactions to a nineteenth-century masterpiece place the characters socially. The sisters, ...

'[B]y the paradox implicit in achieved art', Brookner makes her protagonists' predicaments as satisfying as poetry: this was John Bayley's judgement on A Private View in the Spectator in 1994. Tessa Hadley, another Brookner enthusiast or apologist, makes a similar point in her excellent new introduction to Brookner's last novel, Strangers (see here ): Describing the novels in bald terms of plot can’t come near what it is in Brookner’s writing that’s so addictive, fascinating, pleasure-giving. It’s the old paradox: the more this novelist writes her characters into their bleak corner, the more her readers get their delight. The squeeze of their sadness is so exquisite, in her language. It's a powerful piece, serious in its psychological reading ('the fateful circling of desire: Paul's need to get away succeeded by his longing to return') and original in its depiction of the Brookner reading experience: Brookner’s subject matter is distinctive because...

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/

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 ...