The Brooknerian

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 ...

The available photographs of Anita Brookner date almost exclusively from her fifties onwards. We have a school photo, but nothing from her later youth or early middle age. Most available photos are staged publicity shots. They follow conventions. Brookner no doubt gave as much thought to the tenor of such images as she evidently did to the character of the information she was willing to disclose in the few interviews she allowed. She doesn't often smile. A set of 'new' photos is available to view on Ebay at the moment (type 'Anita Brookner photo'). They comprise a collection of images turned out of an old newspaper archive. We see Brookner reading Spycatcher on her familiar striped sofa. We see her in a flowered dress smiling (this is from 1989, at a Lewis Percy signing). We see her clutching  Hotel du Lac at the 1984 Booker Prize dinner. And we see a rare impromptu shot of a startled Brookner in what looks like a hotel lobby. I suspect this was taken on one of he...

My thing with Brookner goes back exactly 25 years ago when Hotel du Lac won the Booker prize. To an aspiring literary critic, this frail, thin book about a frail, thin heroine coming to terms with loveless solitude at a Swiss hotel seemed the epitome of the bloodless, sexless, plotless English novel that had led us to study American literature at college.  Subsequently, one of the subjects for my debut appearance on the Radio 3 chatshow Critics' Forum turned out to be the latest Brookner, in which another west London spinster didn't quite get it together with a semi-comatose widower. What passed for a plot twist was the heroine experiencing a severe migraine. I have a memory of a moment when the central character was forced to return early from a stroll because the weight of the spectacle frames on her nose had become unbearable. Mark Lawson, Guardian , 2009 Mark Lawson's review of Brookner's 2009 novel Strangers isn't the only example of a critic recanti...

I met Anita Brookner only once. I was in a London street with my French friend Marie Delemotte. It was August 1992, and I was nineteen. Marie was much older - ours was a cross-generational friendship - and when I excitedly told her the identity of the rather elderly-looking woman tottering towards us on the pavement, my friend, unimpressed, said, with what I probably would have called Gallic insouciance, 'Oh, go to her! Why not?' But my heart was thumping. Here was my heroine, my favourite author - here in a London street, at two o'clock on a summer's afternoon - here, in the flesh, or the somewhat exiguous flesh, for the woman approaching us was very thin and seemed frail. She walked with a stick. But Brookner would only have been in her sixties in 1992, and was to live another twenty years and more. She wore a white blouse, a white skirt and a red blazer with large shoulders. Her hair, bright auburn, looked newly coiffed. The street was Elm Park Gardens, Brookner...