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
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
Friends, Associates Rosamond Lehmann
In her final decade RL 's old friends found her difficult and demanding; but the rediscovery of her novels brought her the pleasure of young friends: publisher Carmen Callil , novelist Anita Brookner , and...
Intertextuality and Influence Edna O'Brien
EOB has named many women writers as important to her: she includes among these Jane Austen , Emily Dickinson , Elizabeth Bowen , Anna Akhmatova , Anita Brookner , and Margaret Atwood , adding: Every...
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 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...
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 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.
Mackay, Shena. The Orchard on Fire. Vintage, 1999.
prelims
Fay Weldon said...
Literary responses Hilary Mantel
This novel won the Hawthornden Prize the year after publication.It received generally enthusiastic reviews, although Anita Brookner evinced a degree of wariness in her comment: The novel, though expert, is unsettling. It is unsettling through...
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
Literary responses Deborah Moggach
This was the only one of DM 's books that her father disliked—a reaction caused by his fear of its being biographically interpreted.
Miller, Lucasta. “The home front”. The Guardian, p. 11.
11
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Galen Swanson , expressed admiration for...
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.
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 Caroline Blackwood
Anita Brookner remarked in the Times Literary Supplement on the recipes' tendency tocuisine grosseur.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/, http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
CB replied in a letter to the journal begging Brookner to lighten up; the marketing director of Cadbury Typhoo
Literary responses Edna O'Brien
Reviews of this novel were mixed. Anita Brookner expressed in the Spectator the view that O'Brien had failed to live up to her usual standard.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
231
Carol Shields wrote in the Globe and Mail:...

Timeline

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.