The Brooknerian

Will anyone ever get round to writing Anita Brookner's biography? It is less likely than it might have been once. The golden age of literary biography was in the last century. Simply, the economics of publishing probably wouldn't support a latter-day Bevis Hillier or Norman Sherry, whose multi-volume John Betjeman and Graham Greene lives respectively were the fruit of decades of work (Sherry was said to have visited every place Greene ever set foot in). Then there are the lesser 'hack' biographies that often appear more quickly after an author's death. These are culled largely from material already in the public domain. Such a biographer might find so private and retiring figure as Anita Brookner a recalcitrant subject for such a job. She was a public figure, but only up to a point, and only really from her fifties onwards. Any more comprehensive life would entail a lot of research and a lot of interviews. She herself gave few interviews and rarely appeared on the r...

I've been reading George Eliot's Romola , a novel with a forbidding reputation. Many great novelists carry such burdens. When reading Dickens I left Barnaby Rudge till last. And I've never managed to get more than a few pages into Virginia Woolf's The Waves . ( Barnaby Rudge is actually rather brilliant, and I've high hopes of Romola .) Which, I wonder, is the prodigal among Anita Brookner's family of novels, ready one day for rehabilitation and the fatted calf? I've  explored in a previous post  the precarious status of A Friend from England and A Misalliance . But my money's on Lewis Percy . It's different in tone and setting from other Brookners. On publication (like Barnaby Rudge ) it got a very bad press. I've considered its merits  in another earlier post . Let's all give it a hearing one of these days. Leighton, 'The Blind Scholar and His Daughter' Romola