‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If people have heard of Brookner today, Hermione Lee says, they imagine a lonely, cardiganed woman yearning for an absent lover. “This,” says Lee (an emeritus English professor at the University of Oxford), “won’t do.”
The cardiganed image confuses the author with her protagonists. Of 24 novels written across 30 years, only the first four – A Start in Life, Providence, Look at Me and Hotel du Lac – are about a single woman pining for love. There is certainly a “Brooknerian” style, characterised by elegance, restraint and melancholia, but her fiction engaged with our emotional lives broadly, examining family, exile, home, trauma, ageing and much more.
Born in 1928 and raised in south London by a fearsome Polish-Jewish grandmother and absurdly ineffectual parents (a tobacco salesman and a failed singer), Brookner was a highly academic only child. After a degree at King’s College London, she briefly tasted freedom as a student in Paris, but was soon dragged back to care for her extraordinarily needy mother. Yoked to home for the next decade, she managed, nevertheless, to become a brilliant art critic and a charismatic lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where she stayed until retirement.
In the introduction, Lee describes hearing the author’s voice saying, repeatedly, “Go away”, and Brookner’s 20s and 30s were the “most hidden, the least witnessed” of all. Brookner did her utmost to erase her life, and Lee is forced, therefore, to mine any detail she can find. As well as Brookner’s academic work and extensive reading habits, we get her poor handwriting, fear of trains, love of perfumes and at one particularly desperate point, salary increases over two decades. A couple of love affairs in her 30s fizzled out, but if there was ever a record of her feelings, Brookner expunged it. The first 200 pages, then, can be hard going. She was, says Lee, through gritted teeth, “an object of mystery and puzzlement”.
But Lee persists – always rake thin, Brookner kept slimming biscuits in her handbag; she loved babies; she doled out tranquillisers to nervous PhD candidates – and just as this enterprise starts to feel doomed, something miraculous happens. The tireless details begin to cohere and Brookner steps out of the shadows, intriguing, contradictory – the super brain who shaved 10 years off her age in her own Who’s Who entry; the self-proclaimed “loneliest woman in London” who had loads of friends.
The older she gets, the more interesting this book becomes. In 1979, her beloved Courtauld mentor, friend and boss, Anthony Blunt, was exposed as a Soviet spy. Shaken, Brookner remained loyal until she discovered he’d used her to extract information from a hospitalised colleague.
Reeling and depressed, facing another lonely summer, she found herself writing fiction. Her process was extraordinary. Each novel took only three months from start to finish. She’d roam London forming sentences in her head, then simply write them down, at speed. Hilary Mantel, a fervent admirer, said Brookner arrived as a novelist perfectly formed, “as if she had hatched from a marbled egg”. She would repeat this process, annually, for more than two decades.
In 1984, her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, about a woman who jilts her fiancee and retreats to a Swiss hotel, won the Booker prize. Pretty much everyone expected JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun or Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot to win. The misogyny was mind-bending. At the ceremony, Ballard hissed, “You stole my Booker.” Private Eye snarked about “Hotel du Lac of Interest” and a grim pattern of critical disdain was set. For the rest of Brookner’s writing life, critics would carp about “doily” novels and compare her to Mills & Boon. Profiles were invariably illustrated with sad spinsters holding cups of tea. It tormented her. But she kept on writing.
She was, personally, far from isolated. She had devoted friends, including the Virago publisher Carmen Callil and fellow writers such as Rosamond Lehmann or Julian Barnes, who offers loving memories here. He was so intimidated by her eloquence when they lunched that he’d feel himself inserting semicolons into his own speech.
Was she a literary genius? She once, brilliantly, described novel-writing as “trying very hard to remember something which has not yet taken place”. Lee offers genuinely transporting literary criticism, unearthing the elegance and complexity of the work, but admits the compulsive production of a book a year diluted the impact and sometimes the quality. Still, she singles out three – Family and Friends, Latecomers and The Next Big Thing – as truly “outstanding” novels. Thankfully, it is no longer cool to Brookner-bash. This astute and tireless biography succeeds, against the odds, in unearthing the author – who would be appalled by our scrutiny. Above all, it shows that the work deserves our full attention.
• Anita Brookner: Art and Life by Hermione Lee is published by Chatto & Windus (£28). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
