Anita Brookner

The new, and only, biography of Booker Prize-winning novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, from one of our leading literary biographers

Anita Brookner, art historian and novelist, was an intensely private person, who kept her friends in separate compartments and had secrets she never revealed. She grew tired of the assumption that her lonely heroines were versions of herself, and she resisted autobiographical readings of her books. But she gave away many intriguing glimpses of her own family life in interviews, and her own feelings, experiences and preoccupations fill her writings. Her life-story is both hidden and exposed.

Born in south London in 1928, Brookner came from a family of middle-class, Polish-Jewish immigrants, with anxious, unhappy parents. Well into her thirties, she nursed her invalid mother, with a painful mixture of love and resentment. She would have liked a marriage and children; instead, she lived alone and became a great writer of solitude, self-knowledge and survival. For many years she worked at the Courtauld Institute, teaching French Romanticism, and influencing generations of students. In her fifties she began to write fiction: her first novel was the wryly titled A Start in Life. In 1984, she won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac; after that, a novel appeared almost every year until her eighties.

In her lifetime Brookner was seen as an object of wonder and fascination. She was a formidable and inspiring teacher, an enormously knowledgeable, witty and perceptive art-historian and critic, and a novelist like no other. Her extraordinary fictions of heroic solitude, romantic passion, longing, and lethal social comedy, written with elegance and impeccable control, gained her a devoted following. But she also attracted some hostility and bafflement, often from readers challenged by the unsentimental realism of her fierce, strange and moving books.

In this groundbreaking biography, Hermione Lee reveals the full story of a brilliant, idiosyncratic and complex woman and goes deep into Brookner’s marvellous work, in all its stylishness and daring.