The Brooknerian

It's traditional to post on Twitter one's reads of the year. I'm not in the same league as those lightning-fast folk for whom the above pile would represent the books digested in an average month, or even week. I'm not sure I feel too much envy. Let slow reading be a thing. No Anita? a contributor enquired. And it is true: I sometimes take long breaks. I first read her in 1990, and read them all - a mere handful in those days. From then on, yearly, I'd wolf down her novels as they appeared: usually in late August, or so it seems in sunset-lit memory. I prefer, perhaps, especially at times such as now, a long digressive immersive meandering novel, a novel to get lost in, and the nineteenth century usually supplies. Of the above I think I loved Quentin Durward most. You read it and you're in the nineteenth century again, and yet also in the fifteenth. It's a strange, complex, mazy fantastical reading experience. (The bisque bust, by the way, is a Robinson and...

Anita Brookner was never one for easy hyperbole, only for that which was earned and justified by time. One wonders what she would have made of 2020. No doubt she would have reserved judgement. Her essays and reviews are often at their most piquant when considering something from which she withholds praise. I've been reading 'Descent into the Untestable', a review in Soundings of a book of 1980 on regression in the arts from the eighteenth into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of large movements, notions such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism, will be familiar to readers of Brookner. In Providence (1982), Kitty Maule and her students mount lofty seductive arguments: Existentialism as a late manifestation of Romanticism - and the like. But Dr Brookner herself would caution her own pupils: Art doesn't love you and cannot console you. Here she argues for the limitations of art. 'Artistic traditions are self-generating and at best reflexive. One cannot...

I wondered that she should waste so much energy fighting over a little matter like wearing hats in chapel, but then I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us - the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies; the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction. A shared bathroom, a newly brushed carpet, the funny little bags you get tea in abroad, a bombed-out church: Excellent Women depicts a world as distant as Pompeii. Manners are antique too: a celibate clergyman is no cause for speculation, a spinster may happily disclaim the slightest hint of experience, and everyone smokes. It's funny, of course, because it is Barbara Pym, but funny in a particular and hard-to-define way. Self-deprecating doesn't quite cut it. Irony? Mockery? A celebration of the trivial and the ridiculous? Her voice, so prized, is unmistakable. 'Do we need tea?' she echoed. 'But Miss Lathbury......

As ever, Brookner scholar Dr Peta Mayer offers insightful comment (see Liverpool University Press blog here ). Her reading (misreading?) of a photograph of a smoking Brookner in a Wildean pose is particularly tangy. I myself have spied in Brookner's images wily references and analogues. Were the photographers in on such jokes, one wonders? The National Portrait Gallery holds another Lucy Anne Dickens ( here ), possibly taken at the same sitting as the Wilde shot. (The chair is the same, though not the sweater.) The chair to the side, the body in profile, the sidelong glance... the lamp... What bells ring in the subversive Brooknerian mind? Step forward, Madame Récamier...

I read Hardy as a child, or in my teens. A favourite teacher introduced him, and, alert to signs, I took it as the done thing to consume the lot. At some point I read The Trumpet-Major , possibly in the very edition pictured. I remember little, my reading memory erased by other encounters. Hardy cannot by any stretch of the imagination be deemed a Brooknerian writer. This was but one of the reasons for a prejudice I've maintained to this day. Other reasons include a suspicion of auto-didacts and an impression of awkward style. Having read, in recent years, a lot of Scott (having exhausted the Brooknerian reservoirs of James, Dickens, Trollope), I idly wondered how Hardy tackled the historical novel genre. The Trumpet-Major has a backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. Real figures - George III, Captain Hardy - intermingle with fictional. Where the novel departs from the Scott model is in its flash-forwards. Hardy cannot resist reminding us that all these people in what's ostensibly a...

This mere four-minute piece ( click here for the BBC Archive #OnThisDay feed ) should be top of the list for any Brooknerian, not least because it is, to my knowledge, the only video of the author freely available. Anita Brookner made only rare media appearances. Buried in archives are, I know, a Channel 4 interview with Hermione Lee and a programme (in the 100 Great Paintings series) Brookner made in 1980, still only an art historian, on, I think, Delacroix. We should be gladdened by this marvellous vouchsafement. There she is: stylish and a-swagger; trenchant in her commitment to the truth.

Not too skilled at literary multitasking, and having enough tasks of other kinds to complete, I don't often have more than one book 'on the go'. But sometimes very different texts will complement one another. As the year darkens I find myself at once in 1870s New York and one of those weird hothouse Italianate courts beloved of Jacobean dramatists. The Age of Innocence depicts 'a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs', while Thomas Middleton's The Maiden's Tragedy is about knowingness and frankness, but not among everyone. In both there is a gender divide, and a further polarity between women who 'know' and those who don't. Edith Wharton distinguishes the 'nice' from the 'free': the virginal May Welland is that 'terrifying product of the social system ... the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything', and for Mi...