Hermione Lee's Biography of Anita Brookner
A new biography by Hermione Lee challenges the reclusive spinster stereotype of novelist Anita Brookner, revealing a complex, brilliant, and socially engaged life.
Hermione Lee's new biography of Anita Brookner confronts the lonely, cardiganed image of the author head-on. Lee, an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford, argues that this popular perception, drawn from her early heroines, is insufficient.
Brookner published her first novel, A Start in Life, at age 53. Its opening line, 'Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature,' established a tone of elegant melancholia. Yet Lee contends that only her first four books focus on a single woman pining for love. Her 24 novels, written over 30 years, engage broadly with family, exile, home, trauma, and ageing.
A Hidden Early Life
Born in 1928, Brookner was raised in south London by a formidable Polish-Jewish grandmother and parents she described as a tobacco salesman and a failed singer. A brilliant academic, she studied at King's College London and briefly in Paris before being pulled home for a decade to care for her needy mother. Despite this, she built a renowned career as an art critic and lecturer at London's Courtauld Institute.
Lee describes Brookner's early decades as the most hidden and least witnessed. The author actively erased her personal history, forcing the biographer to scour for details. The biography notes her poor handwriting, fear of trains, love of perfumes, and even her salary increases. A couple of love affairs in her 30s fizzled without a trace. Lee writes that she was an object of mystery and puzzlement.
The Emergence of a Novelist
The narrative gains momentum as Brookner ages. In 1979, her mentor and friend Anthony Blunt was exposed as a Soviet spy. Brookner remained loyal until learning he had used her to extract information from a hospitalized colleague. Depressed and facing a lonely summer, she turned to writing fiction.
Her process was remarkable. Each novel took just three months. She would roam London composing sentences in her head, then write them down at speed. Novelist Hilary Mantel, a fervent admirer, said Brookner arrived as if she had hatched from a marbled egg. She repeated this process annually for more than two decades.
Critical Reception and the Booker
In 1984, her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, won the Booker Prize. The literary world expected J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun or Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot to win. At the ceremony, Ballard reportedly said she stole his Booker. Private Eye sniped about Hotel du Lac of Interest, setting a pattern of critical disdain. For years, critics dismissed her work as doily novels and compared them to Mills & Boon romances. Profiles were invariably illustrated with sad spinsters holding cups of tea. It tormented her. Lee notes she was called the loneliest woman in London but had loads of friends. The work, Lee concludes, deserves our full attention.
