The Brooknerian

Brookner spoke at length about Family and Friends to Olga Kenyon in Women Writers Talk (1989). 'It's my family,' she said. 'Of course they're rendered into fiction because I didn't know them till I was about seventeen - when I began to see them as separate people.' It was indeed a family photo that sparked the novel: a cousin showed her a wedding picture with her grandmother dominating the group. 'I gave the photograph back, but the following day I began to write Family and Friends . I had always avoided writing about my family. They had given me a good deal of trouble in real life.' Although, largely from lack of knowledge, she fictionalised the early lives of the uncles and aunts in the novel, 'somewhere in the course of this invention, I discovered I was writing what amounted to a true chronicle. Whether this was an obscure form of unconscious memory, whether it was intuition, or whether it was the exhilaration of disposing of these ch...

Interviewer: Despite their subtlety and variations, all your books so far have been basically about love. Do you think you will go on writing about love? Brookner: What else is there? All the rest is mere literature! 1987 Paris Review interview Interviewer: Where do you see yourself in the tradition of English literature? Brookner: I don't know anything like that. I'm a middle-class, middle-brow novelist. And that's it. It amuses me.  2001 Observer interview 'You write about love,' says Mr Neville. 'And you will never write anything different, I suspect, until you begin to take a harder look at yourself.' Anita Brookner, in interview, purported to be on Edith's side, even to the extent of pretending she herself was Edith's kind of novelist. Yet in none of Edith Hope's novels would we find the sort of exchange that takes up much of chapter 7 of Hotel du Lac . The conversation is a deconstruction of the terms that underpin E...

Kenyon: Why is it that you didn't begin writing till middle age, like Edith Wharton? Had you been writing in secret? Brookner: No, there were no secret notebooks, not a scrap, not a sentence. Olga Kenyon,  Women Writers Talk , 1989 What, then, is one to make of the following startling piece, published along with the obituaries last year? Piles of exercise books? In bed? In French? Anthony Blunt liked to invent new ‘special subjects’ for third-year undergraduates. One of them was ‘19th-century art criticism in England and France’. Anita Brookner taught our students about Baudelaire while I was deputed to introduce them to Ruskin and Pater. This was in 1966.  Thus we formed an unlikely friendship. Anita would never enter a pub, but we sometimes had a drink in a little cafe opposite the Archives Nationales in Paris, and she liked lunching in the restaurant at Fenwick’s in Bond Street. A quarter of a trout would fill her.  She was smartly dressed, but in tho...

OK, so it isn't actually lost, but it is little known and hard to come by. Olga Kenyon in her interview with Anita Brookner in Women Writers Talk (Lennard, 1989) takes the following stance: 'Brookner revitalises the romance as she fictionalises its restricting of female potential'. The meeting, one senses, wasn't entirely harmonious, and later Brookner would be interviewed mainly by men. Kenyon: What were your mother's expectations? Brookner: She wanted me to be another kind of person altogether. I should have looked different, should have been more popular, socially more graceful, one of those small, coy, kittenish women who get their way. If my novels contain a certain amount of grief it is to do with my not being what I would wish to be.  [...]  K: Did your parents ever talk about their past - or the holocaust? B: No, and I'm grateful for that. K: I believe you made plans to visit Poland, but didn't go. Why? B: For a Jew, Poland is not exactly ...