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.
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.
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.
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
Caroline Blackwood
Anita Brookner
remarked in the Times Literary Supplement on the recipes' tendency tocuisine grosseur.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 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.
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...
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.
