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
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 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 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 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.
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 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...
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...
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...
Occupation Honoré de Balzac
Mary Russell Mitford translated some of Balzac's works. His oeuvre influenced many writers, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon , Storm Jameson , and Natalie Clifford Barney , and has attracted criticism from Anita Brookner .
Publishing Margaret Kennedy
Initial sales of the novel were slow but by the new year it was being widely read and the author had attained celebrity status. Almost instantly, she began working on a stage adaptation, which was...
Publishing Margaret Kennedy
This novel has seen many subsequent editions, including a 1985 reprint in Virago 's Modern Classics series, for which Anita Brookner again wrote the introduction.
OCLC WorldCat. http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.
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.