Anita Brookner : Art and Life

One of our most brilliant biographers illuminates the life and work of an incomparable, extraordinary and fascinating novelist.

“Hermione Lee is a literary life-writer par excellence.” —The Atlantic


Anita Brookner is famous for her quiet, incisive studies of solitary and emotionally restrained characters—often middle-class women—navigating loneliness, disappointment, and small eruptions of desire beneath a façade of reserve. She is so closely associated with these protagonists, in fact, that many people imagine the author herself as a woman in a long gray cardigan, gazing out the window of a bleak London flat or onto the misty waters of a Swiss lake, yearning for an absent or unreliable lover. Yet as Hermione Lee demonstrates in her captivating and absorbing biography, Brookner the writer was the inventor of those lonely women, not their alter ego.

Brookner herself was formidable, witty, elegant, precise, and controlled. Her life was full of contradictions. She was for many years a much-admired art historian and teacher. She was the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge. Her first novel, ironically entitled A Start in Life, was published at the age of fifty-three. A Booker Prize followed soon after for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, and then her reputation as one of Britain’s leading novelists was established. At her death in 2016, she left behind twenty-five novels, several volumes of art history, and a wealth of criticism. But very few personal papers survived. She was a private person who wanted to keep herself hidden and to remain enigmatic. Now, in Hermione Lee’s book, Brookner’s character is revealed to us. This luminous portrait seamlessly weaves life and work into a vivid, insightful, and riveting narrative that sheds a penetrating light on a writer—and woman—like no other.