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
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Michèle Roberts
This volume brings together pieces from various occasions and venues. In them MR discusses many of her favourite topics—the food, sex and god named in her title, the second and third often involving the relation...
Textual Production Mary Wesley
It appeared exactly a year after she had finished the first draft (working title Period Piece) and put away the manuscript (written in ink on paper of A4 size, with lines but without margins)...
Reception Angela Carter
Nights at the Circus, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, remains AC 's best known work.
Gamble, Sarah. Angela Carter. A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan.
1
Lee, Alison. Angela Carter. Twayne.
93
The fact that it did not make the short-list (the Booker that year went to...
Publishing Margaret Kennedy
This novel has seen many subsequent editions, including a 1985 reprint in Virago 's Modern Classics series, for which Anita Brookner again wrote the introduction.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
Publishing Edith Templeton
This novel appeared in the USA as Proper Bohemians. The 1985 Hogarth Press edition retains the original title and has an introduction by Anita Brookner .
Publishing Edith Templeton
This too has a Hogarth Press edition, 1986, with an introduction by Anita Brookner .
Publishing Edith Templeton
This novel too was reprinted by the Hogarth Press , 1985, with Anita Brookner 's introduction.
Publishing Edith Templeton
The back cover reproduces a painting of ET by Daphne Day , and there are photos of buildings, paintings, landscape, and masquerade costumes. The first impression sold out and a new impression was run off...
Publishing Margaret Kennedy
Initial sales of the novel were slow but by the new year it was being widely read and the author had attained celebrity status. Almost instantly, she began working on a stage adaptation, which was...
Occupation Honoré de Balzac
Mary Russell Mitford translated some of Balzac's works. His oeuvre influenced many writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon , Storm Jameson , and Natalie Clifford Barney , and has attracted criticism from Anita Brookner .
Literary responses Margaret Kennedy
Brookner calls Troy Chimneys a disconcerting novel because of its occasionally puzzling arrangment and the oblique. . . manner in which it is told.
Brookner, Anita, and Margaret Kennedy. “Introduction”. Troy Chimneys, Virago, p. vii - x.
vii, ix, x
It won, nevertheless, the 1953 James Tait Black...
Literary responses Edith Templeton
While some reviewers criticised this novel as superficial, the New York Times found in it a brisk but sympathetic discourse upon human folly and the blind fanaticism of people determined to preserve an outmoded way...
Literary responses Doris Lessing
This novel was, however, highly and perceptively praised by Anita Brookner in a retrospective review reprinted in her Soundings, 1997. The Royal Swedish Academy in 2007 called it one of the handful of books...
Literary responses Penelope Lively
This work was shortlisted for the Sunday Express book of the year award.
Lively, Penelope. A House Unlocked. Penguin.
prelims
Anita Brookner (a devoted reader of PL , who values her ability to make the ordinary seem full of interest, and...
Literary responses Edith Templeton
Brookner says that in this novel ET was trying to entertain the English without frightening them.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. Living on Yesterday, Hogarth Press.

Timeline

January 1996: Novelist Kate Mosse and a committee of literary...

Women writers item

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...

Texts

Brookner, Anita. A Closed Eye. Random House, 1991.
Brookner, Anita. A Closed Eye. Jonathan Cape, 1991.
Brookner, Anita. A Family Romance. Jonathan Cape, 1993.
Brookner, Anita. A Friend from England. Jonathan Cape, 1987.
Brookner, Anita. A Misalliance. Jonathan Cape, 1986.
Brookner, Anita. A Private View. Jonathan Cape, 1994.
Brookner, Anita. A Start in Life. Jonathan Cape, 1981.
Brookner, Anita. Altered States. Jonathan Cape, 1996.
Brookner, Anita. Brief Lives. Jonathan Cape, 1990.
Brookner, Anita. Falling Slowly. Random House, 1988.
Brookner, Anita. Falling Slowly. Viking, 1998.
Brookner, Anita. Family and Friends. Jonathan Cape, 1985.
Brookner, Anita. Fraud. Jonathan Cape, 1992.
Brookner, Anita. Hotel du Lac. Jonathan Cape, 1984.
Brookner, Anita. Incidents in the Rue Laugier. Jonathan Cape, 1995.
Brookner, Anita. Incidents in the Rue Laugier. Random House, 1996.
Brookner, Anita, and Margaret Kennedy. “Introduction”. The Constant Nymph, Virago, 1983, p. ix - xiv.
Brookner, Anita, and Margaret Kennedy. “Introduction”. Troy Chimneys, Virago, 1985, p. vii - x.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. Summer in the Country, Hogarth Press, 1985.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. The Island of Desire, Hogarth Press, 1985.
Brookner, Anita, and Edith Templeton. “Introduction”. Living on Yesterday, Hogarth Press, 1986.
Brookner, Anita. J. A. Dominique Ingres. Purnell, 1965.
Brookner, Anita. Latecomers. Jonathan Cape, 1988.
Brookner, Anita. Latecomers. Grafton, 1989.
Brookner, Anita. Lewis Percy. Jonathan Cape, 1989.