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.
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
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
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. ....
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...
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
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.
Publishing
Edith Templeton
This novel too was reprinted by the Hogarth Press
, 1985, with Anita Brookner
's introduction.
Literary responses
Edith Templeton
Anita Brookner
notes that many reviewers felt this book to be in bad taste, a world away from such entertaining hits of this year as Margery Allingham
's Tiger in the Smoke, Nancy Spain
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...
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
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
.
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Brookner, Anita. Look at Me. Jonathan Cape, 1983.
Brookner, Anita. Providence. Jonathan Cape, 1982.
Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents. Viking, 2000.
Brookner, Anita. Soundings. Harvill Press, 1997.
Brookner, Anita. Strangers. Penguin, 2009.
Templeton, Edith, and Anita Brookner. Summer in the Country. Hogarth Press, 1985.
Brookner, Anita. The Bay of Angels. Viking, 2001.
Kennedy, Margaret, and Anita Brookner. The Constant Nymph. Virago, 1983.
Brookner, Anita. The Genius of the Future. Phaidon, 1971.
Templeton, Edith, and Anita Brookner. The Island of Desire. Hogarth Press, 1985, http://U of A HSS.
Brookner, Anita. “The Loneliness of Miss Pym”. Sunday Times, p. 45.
Brookner, Anita. The Next Big Thing. Viking, 2002.
Brookner, Anita. “The return of the earth mother”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4013, p. 202.
Brookner, Anita. Undue Influence. Viking, 1999.
Brookner, Anita. Visitors. Jonathan Cape, 1997.
Brookner, Anita. “We have stood apart studiously”. The Spectator, Vol.