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.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | 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 | Penelope Lively | This work was shortlisted for the Sunday Express book of the year award. Lively, Penelope. A House Unlocked. Penguin, 2002. prelims |
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 |
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 |
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 Halio, Jay L., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 14. Gale Research, 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. |
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 |
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 |
Literary responses | Barbara Pym | 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 | Lettice Cooper | 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... |
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...