ANITA BROOKNER

A private life.

Award-winning biographer Lee turns her attention to English novelist, critic, and art historian Anita Brookner (1928-2016), who published her first novel at age 53 and, thereafter, produced one a year for the next 21 years. These “realistic human comedies” generally feature a “thwarted character” whose yearnings are unrequited and who learns “the cost of passion, and the lessons of suffering and disappointment.” With her fiction “full of solitaries,” Brookner, who destroyed much evidence of her personal life, earned a reputation for being a thwarted character herself: unloved, unlovable. Lee counters that assumption, diving into Brookner’s life and times, her prolific critical writings and fiction, with energy and insight, arguing that she was witty, stylish, and urbane: “a deeply romantic and passionate writer whose armour is an austere, controlled manner.” Of Polish Jewish ancestry, Brookner was the only child of a strained marriage. Needy or unhappy parents recur in her fiction, “always with damaging effects on their child.” In 1950, she left home for Paris to pursue research for a doctorate in art history but soon was summoned back to London when her parents’ health declined. Lee follows her interwoven careers as a writer, teacher, and art historian at the Courtauld Institute, where she was promoted to a full-time position in 1964. She was an attentive mentor, admired lecturer, and engaged colleague. Still, she circumscribed her activities: walking at the same time each day, dining out for an hour, always ordering the same meal, attending gatherings for five minutes at a time. She suffered throughout her life from anxiety, depression, migraines, and insomnia. Her friend Julian Barnes remarked that she was “a solitary, not a lonely woman,” and Lee agrees. After reading this majestic biography, readers may agree, too, or maybe not.

A deeply researched, empathetic portrayal.