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
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...
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.
63: 444
while writer John Braine has called her a natural novelist.
Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research.
14: 759
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
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)...
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...

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Texts

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