Hermione Lee's biography illuminates Anita Brookner's life

Hermione Lee's new biography of Anita Brookner dismantles the popular image of the author as a mirror of her solitary heroines. Instead, Lee presents Brookner as a 'dandyish, witty, controlled' inventor of characters, whose life and art were shaped by a formal elegance she felt compelled to live up to.

The Biographer's Task and the Novelist's Self

A serious literary biographer seeks to illuminate the writer's mind and the manufacturing of the self, a process novelist Anita Brookner spent a lifetime handling. As Lee's work shows, Brookner was the creator of her fictional women, not their alter ego, yet over 24 novels and 87 years, she may have become more like the people she dreamed into life. The biography suggests this is a novelist's fate: not that their characters are like them, but that they become their characters. Brookner's affinity, Lee notes, was with France, not her Polish heritage, a connection felt in the patterns and discretion of her sentences.

The Subtlety of Brookner's Fiction

Brookner's novels deal in painful, tender subtleties that shape a life. In Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995), a woman marries the wrong man and grapples with a lifelong sense of dishonor not from infidelity, but from unrequited love. At her best, Brookner choreographs these moments with a power of implication admired in Henry James. Her genius often shines in domestic detail, as in Falling Slowly (1998), where a character picks up 'a bunch of anemones, as an adjunct to the asparagus quiche.' Brookner's characters, through shopping and longing, begin to see who they are or, more painfully, who they might never be.

Routines, Loneliness, and a Modernist Edge

Brookner's characters are defined by habits of concealment that become domestic routines. In Brief Lives (1990), actress Julia Wilberforce, who lives on omelettes and whisky, is 'a stickler for amusement, although she had absolutely no sense of humour.' Her friend Fay embodies a dutiful wistfulness, treating everyday disappointments as life's point. The novel touches on a loneliness Brookner often discussed. 'There is a murky area in women which deepens once old alliances are invaded by a man,' Fay observes. Later she adds, 'I was astonished at my own sadness... What I felt was my own vulnerability.'

Brookner's understanding of vulnerability extended to men, whom she wrote about with a delicacy rare among her English contemporaries. In Family and Friends (1985), she writes of sons with 'the legendary but short-lived handsomeness of those men who die young,' and of fathers whose infinite kindliness awakens in their daughters 'secret dreams of hard, fierce, brutal men.'

The review in the London Review of Books concludes with a personal reflection: reading Brookner's novels often prompts the thought that her unhappy heroines most need a novel by Anita Brookner themselves. A character like Fay, on a disastrous, lonely holiday, could use a procession of gin and tonics and a comprehending book to make the day brighten.