The Brooknerian

The Prerogative Court, Doctors' Commons Illustrated London News  1 June 1850 The languid stillness of the place was only broken by the chirping of this fire and by the voice of one of the Doctors, who was wandering slowly through a perfect library of evidence, and stopping to put up, from time to time, at little roadside inns of argument on the journey. David Copperfield , ch. 23 David begins work, apprenticed to Doctors' Commons, a legal backwater that seems very agreeable: he commends the 'dreamy nature of this retreat'. Such undemanding havens have attractions for Brookner's characters too, not least Jane Manning in A Family Romance , who goes to work at a press cuttings agency (somewhat unimaginatively called ABC Enterprises), where she is immediately looked after by 'the dearest women', Margaret and Wendy (ch. 5). But this is Brookner, not Barbara Pym, or for that matter Dickens. Nothing can be allowed to remain too cosy for long. Class...

She soon had a clientele among the girls, cheerful, stoical, good-natured creatures who petted the baby and took to spending their off-duty moments in the workroom with Fanny. There was nothing downtrodden about these girls; they regarded ordinary married women with scorn and pity. A Family Romance , ch. 3 Brookner's determined blithe tolerance of what would now be called sex work is of some interest. It may be that she's cocking a snook at the political correctness that was coming into its own at the time of A Family Romance 's publication (1993). Or at feminism - of which Brookner wasn't a noted follower. But it probably has its roots in her affection for the modes and mores of the eighteenth century. The girls, during the Occupation, became, we learn, mistresses: they were, as Brookner puts it, 'elevated to the status of regular mistress'. The conservative imagination, far from being outraged by such goings on, instead is almost reassured by a sense o...

'Look at it from his point of view, Zoe. He is of a different generation. As, I suppose, I am.'  'That argument doesn't hold water. All women are in the same boat now. The Women's Movement...'  'Yes, I have heard of it,' she said drily.  'We're free now,' I went on. We don't have to respect men, be grateful to them. It's their turn to respect women, to allow them some space...'  'Oh, yes, I've heard of that space. What will you all do in it, apart from complain?' We know from interviews that Anita Brookner did not identify as a feminist ('I don't read Spare Rib or anything like that,' she told John Haffenden), and indeed was at times dismissive of the movement. Zoe and her mother's telephone quarrel in Chapter 5 of The Bay of Angels summarises something of the debate Brookner engages in elsewhere in her fiction. Fiction is one thing, interviews are another. In fiction Brookner has the leave...