Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Anita Brookner
-
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.
"Anita Brookner" by Sophie Bassouls,1989-09-18.Retrieved from https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/anita-brookner-recipient-of-the-1984-booker-prize-for-her-news-photo/852310816.
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
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
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, 1981–2025, Numerous volumes.
63: 444
while writer John Braine
has called her a natural novelist.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research, 1982–1983.
14: 759
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...
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, 22 Feb. 2009, p. 202.
202
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, 1985, 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
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, 1986.
Literary responses
Penelope Lively
This work was shortlisted for the Sunday Express book of the year award.
Lively, Penelope. A House Unlocked. Penguin, 2002.
prelims
Anita Brookner
(a devoted reader of PL
, who values her ability to make the ordinary seem full of interest, and...
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...
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.
