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 Margaret Kennedy
Brookner calls Troy Chimneys a disconcerting novel because of its occasionally puzzling arrangment and the oblique. . . manner in which it is told.
Brookner, Anita, and Margaret Kennedy. “Introduction”. Troy Chimneys, Virago, 1985, p. vii - x.
vii, ix, x
It won, nevertheless, the 1953 James Tait Black...
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, 1986.
Literary responses Doris Lessing
This novel was, however, highly and perceptively praised by Anita Brookner in a retrospective review reprinted in her Soundings, 1997. The Royal Swedish Academy in 2007 called it one of the handful of books...
Literary responses Penelope Lively
This work was shortlisted for the Sunday Express book of the year award.
Lively, Penelope. A House Unlocked. Penguin, 2002.
prelims
Anita Brookner (a devoted reader of PL , who values her ability to make the ordinary seem full of interest, and...
Literary responses Shena Mackay
SM 's fellow-novelists greeted this work with a chorus of praise. Anita Brookner called it something quite rare . . . a rite of passage which will leave few readers unaffected.
qtd. in
Mackay, Shena. The Orchard on Fire. Vintage, 1999.
prelims
Fay Weldon said...
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, 19 May 2007, p. 11.
11
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer, Galen Swanson , expressed admiration for...
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 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, 2009.
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, 2007.
399
Claire Tomalin called it a novel about a hate affair...
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 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 .
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. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

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.