Anita Brookner

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Standard Name: Brookner, Anita
Birth Name: Anita Brookner
AB began publishing as an academic translator, art historian, and book reviewer in the 1960s and 70s, but became far better known for her novels. She was fifty when her first work of fiction appeared; after that they followed in astonishingly rapid succession to the number of twenty-four, passing equally rapidly into paperback. She was both popular and on the whole critically respected, yet she attracted from some reviewers a strain of virulently hostile comment.
Close-up portrait of Anita Brooker, seated with her hands under her chin, in front of bookshelves at her home in Chelsea, London, 18 September 1989.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Edith Templeton
In 1984 the novelist Anita Brookner met ET at Bordighera. After their meeting, according to Templeton, they corresponded until the friendship was broken by Templeton's shock at discovering that Brookner had trained with Anthony Blunt
Friends, Associates Rosamond Lehmann
In her final decade RL 's old friends found her difficult and demanding; but the rediscovery of her novels brought her the pleasure of young friends: publisher Carmen Callil , novelist Anita Brookner , and...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
Literary responses Fay Weldon
Anita Brookner , in the Times Literary Supplement in 1980, called FWone of the most astute and distinctive women writing fiction today,
Contemporary Authors: New Revision Series. Gale Research, 1981.
63: 444
while writer John Braine has called her a natural novelist.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research, 1983.
14: 759
Literary responses Caroline Blackwood
Anita Brookner remarked in the Times Literary Supplement on the recipes' tendency tocuisine grosseur.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
CB replied in a letter to the journal begging Brookner to lighten up; the marketing director of Cadbury Typhoo
Literary responses Edna O'Brien
Reviews of this novel were mixed. Anita Brookner expressed in the Spectator the view that O'Brien had failed to live up to her usual standard.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Carol Shields wrote in the Globe and Mail:...
Literary responses Fay Weldon
Reviewers had mixed responses: Anita Brookner thought there would be anger at the way the novel turns away from the goal of equality with men to assert that female destiny is bodily and maternal.
Brookner, Anita. “The return of the earth mother”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4013, p. 202.
202
Literary responses Barbara Pym
In a negative review in the Sunday Times (headed The Loneliness of Miss Pym), Anita Brookner described Pym's tone and characterizations as coldly detached and reductive, and complained of a determined sexlessness of the...
Literary responses Lettice Cooper
The Persephone reprint of 2004 provided a recuperation opportunity for reviewers. The Guardian reviewer saw the book as a forerunner of Anita Brookner , and wrote that although it is clear where Cooper's sympathies lie...
Literary responses Barbara Pym
Pym is not one of those women writers whose stock has risen through feminist re-evaluation. Five years after the influential Times Literary Supplement article was published, Penelope Lively wrote, I am always surprised that the...
Literary responses Mary Wesley
Anita Brookner 's review in the Spectator must have been a blow: she likened Wesley's work to that of Catherine Cookson and Agatha Christie , calling it stereotyped, nostalgic, reassuring, romantic, tasteful, well-bred, very slight...
Literary responses Jane Gardam
JG continued to attract prizes in her new genre. This work was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and in 1989 won the Baudelaire Prize in France.
British Council Film and Literature Department, in association with Book Trust. Contemporary Writers in the UK.
JG 's father's response to her Booker short-listing...
Literary responses Michèle Roberts
On reaching paperback this book was panned both in the Independent by Murrough O'Brien and in the Guardian by A. H.. O'Brien wrote, The story is marvellous, but the prose often nods. ....
Literary responses Maggie Gee
The cover of the paperback edition quotes Anita Brookner in The Spectator saying I read it twice, and it was even better the second time, and Jeanette Winterson in the Sunday Times saying it was...
Literary responses Germaine Greer
Greer professed herself deeply anxious about the reviews.
Wallace, Christine. Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew. Richard Cohen Books, 1999.
193
The Penguin paperback edition, however, quoted on its cover Anita Brookner in the Observer calling this a brave book,Anthony Storr in the Independent describing it...

Timeline

January 1996
Novelist Kate Mosse and a committee of literary professionals established the Orange Prize for Fiction (later the Baileys Prize, now the Women's Proze for Fiction), a literary prize to be solely awarded to and judged...