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.
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. http://www.contemporarywriters.com.
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.
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
Muriel Spark
Reviews in the USA were mostly bad, though Anita Brookner
published there a detailed, admiring analysis.
Stannard, Martin. Muriel Spark. The Biography. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
465-6
Gabriel Josipovici
, reviewing this novel in the Times Literary Supplement, called MSthe best English novelist...
Literary responses
Muriel Spark
Her friend Graham Greene
hastened to offer his usual compliment of best-since-Memento Mori—this time after reading only the first three pages.
Greene, Graham. Graham Greene. A Life in Letters. Editor Greene, Richard, Alfred A. Knopf.
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.
Literary responses
Shena Mackay
SM
's fellow-novelists greeted this work with a chorus of praise. Anita Brookner
called it something quite rare . . . a rite of passage which will leave few readers unaffected.
