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.
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 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...
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 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:...
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 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.
399
Claire Tomalin called it a novel about a hate affair...
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.
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.
274
, No. 8695, pp. 36-7.