The Brooknerian

No wonder A Misalliance , when it was praised, as it was in the US, was called Jamesian. As the child Elinor is introduced in chapter 3 we get a flurry of literary vibrations: not just of James's Maisie but also, in her name, of Jane Austen, and in a mention of foundlings, of Tom Jones and Dickens's Esther Summerson. Blanche finds herself thinking with 'something like a creator's imagination'. One remembers James again, The Sacred Fount , and 'the joy of determining, almost of creating results'. It's a heady brew, and all the while there's the art: those nymphs in the Italian Rooms of the National Gallery, mocking Blanche's progress. Tiepolo, An Allegory of Venus with Time

'I never thought he would marry, like the others,' thinks Sofka of her son Alfred in chapter 9 of  Family and Friends . 'I thought he had passed the age of danger.' It's a markedly literary novel, in the sense of its allusiveness to other works. The set-piece scene in Wren House with Dolly (a soon-to-be self-allusive choice of name for Anita Brookner) and the scrambled eggs suggests several such rural house-parties in English literature. Howards End , perhaps? L. P. Hartley? There is, additionally, specifically a reference to Dickens. Brookner disdained comparisons with Jane Austen. But doesn't the quote above recall a line from the opening of Persuasion -  Elizabeth Elliot hoping to be propositioned by a baronet within a twelvemonth, recognising as she does her approach to 'the years of danger'?

I'm interested by the middle chapters of Fraud . Here, as in other Brookners, especially later ones, the reader is conscious of authorial unease. In essence she's run out of story, run out of road. It's a predicament that often propels Brookner into new discoveries. These can be raw and difficult, especially in the 2000s novels. But Fraud is Brookner at her mildest, at her most content. So we get Mrs Marsh and her friend Lady Martin 'taking tea' together in chapter 13. I wonder, reading this, what another writer would have made of the same circumstance. If Barbara Pym were writing the scene - or Jane Austen. But this being Brookner, the chapter soon descends into pitiless analysis, bleak self-knowledge, and existential anxiety. Embracing Lady Martin at the end, Mrs Marsh cannot but be aware, beneath her friend's Jolie Madame , of 'the smell of mortality'. Then we have Dr Halliday and his terrible wife. Another stock situation given the Brookner treat...

John Bayley, old-style gentleman of letters, consort to Iris Murdoch, controversial chronicler of her decline, cuts a not wholly satisfactory figure in the Brookner literature. He's a fan, but he's more of a fan of the likes of Barbara Pym and Jane Austen, and this pushes his Brookner criticism a little off centre. Here he is in the Guardian in December 2003, yet again getting it just that little bit wrong: Anita Brookner is on top form with The Rules of Engagement , which carries a plot line as strong as any of Jane Austen's (after reading a Brookner I always want to re-read a Barbara Pym and I chose her last and in some ways best, A Few Green Leaves )...  

There are in this world of ours many separate fandoms, and sometimes they overlap. Often they overlap fairly predictably. So an Anita Brookner fan is probably also going to be at least some sort of a devotee of Henry James (that's me) or Edith Wharton (not me). Other authors who crop up in this regard include Barbara Pym (a not too enormous yes) and Jane Austen (ditto), writers whose world views perhaps aren't quite so aligned with Brookner's. But the coincidences I look for are the stranger ones. Who would have thought the fandoms of Anita Brookner and, for example, Doctor Who might converge? But I find more than a few folk. Myself included. There - I trust I've succeeded in surprising you. I have other enthusiasms. But I have yet to find Brookner fans who are also, say, Kingsley Amis fans or fans of certain 1980s sitcoms. But I live in hope.

I never felt very easy about Jane Austen: I think she made a tremendous, far-reaching decision to leave certain things out. She forfeited passion for wit, and I think that led her to collude with certain little strategems which are horrifying in real life. She wrote about getting husbands. Anita Brookner speaking to John Haffenden, Novelists in Interview , Methuen 1985 Observer : What did you read as a child? Brookner: Ah! Dickens. My father fed me Dickens. Two novels for my birthday, two novels for Christmas until I'd read the lot. And after that I think it was H.G. Wells, for some reason. I've been talked about in the same context as Jane Austen. I didn't stick that label on myself, other people did. Quite inaccurate. I've never got on very well with Jane Austen. 2001 Observer interview 'Just don't mention Jane Austen' I decided to reread Pride and Prejudice - tried to read it with an innocent eye, as if for the first time, as if I didn...

The mid-eighteenth fashion for sensibility - sensibilité , as Brookner calls it - will be familiar to English students like myself, bringing back memories of being force-fed Richardson's Pamela , Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and, with more enjoyment, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey . Sensibility soon became a sort of cult, ripe for send-up by Jane Austen, but at its start it was less a rejection of than a complement to Enlightenment reason, as well as being a rehearsal for Romanticism. Brookner's focus in  Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (1972) is largely art-historical; she places sensibility more precisely 'between the more important and recognizable styles of Rococo and Neoclassicism'. At the same time she traces in some detail the movement's origins in the religious conflicts of the previous century and the earlier eighteenth. Traditional piety, thrown into disrepute, left a gap, a gap filled by the likes of...

What will be Anita Brookner's future literary existence? It seems unlikely either that she'll sink without trace like the once-lauded Angus Wilson, or that she'll benefit from a series of posthumous publications, as in the cases of Barbara Pym and W. G. Sebald. Authors usually experience a dip in the period after their deaths. Kingsley Amis was all but out of print for a while, before being reissued with new covers that recast him as a writer not of the present but of some vaguely 'classic' or vintage yesteryear. The same may already have happened with Brookner.  As I've noted previously,  the new Penguin covers depict Fifties and Sixties scenes, even for novels plainly set in more recent times. Jane Austen didn't become established until the mid-Victorian era. Trollope went into decline after his death, only to go through a renaissance in World War II, when his tales of a gentler world were newly attractive. And Sir Walter Scott, in his day one of the...

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