Anita Brookner, a British author of lean, elegiac and stylistically polished novels who was once labelled the "mistress of gloom" for her depiction of bleak and disappointed lives, usually of women, has died aged 87.
The daughter of well-off Jewish immigrants from Poland, Brookner grew up in London surrounded by relatives and acquaintances, whom she called “transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood”.
That sense of an unfulfilled world carried over into her career as novelist, which began in her 50s, after she had already distinguished herself as an accomplished art historian. Brookner's fiction soon found acclaim, leading to a Booker Prize, for her fourth novel, Hotel du Lac, published in 1984.
That triumph was seen by some literary figures as a surprise; JG Ballard's autobiographical Empire of the Sun had been widely expected to collect the prize. But Brookner fulfilled her promise, writing a book a year for much of the rest of the 20th century.
Desolate bench
“It is the women who dominate her landscape,” English critic Miranda Seymour wrote in the
Atlantic
magazine in 2001, “and they tend to be women of a type: forlorn figures who seem always to be looking for Henry James’ bench of desolation on which to deposit their meekly skirted behinds for an afternoon of fruitless anticipation.”
Brookner's first novel, A Start in Life, published in 1981 when she was 53, was the story of Ruth Weiss, a young academic who seeks contentment in Paris before returning to London – a mirror of a chapter in Brookner's own early life. The novel, published in the US as The Debut, took its title from the Balzac novel Un Début dans la Vie. It introduced readers to the acerbic wit that suffused Brookner's later work.
“To suggest that Brookner is a comic writer might seem perverse,” Seymour wrote. “She is, after all, celebrated as the mistress of gloom.”
Still, Seymour also pointed to Brookner's pithy asides – "a fast, lethal swipe with claws extended". She cited a line in Hotel du Lac, in which the main character, Edith Hope, describing a friend, says, "She was a handsome woman of 45 and would remain so for many years."
Brookner, the author Laura Thompson wrote in 2014, “is more honest about her own sex than any other novelist . . . She would probably be torn to shreds by the new feminists were it not for the fact that her calm style helps to conceal her transgressions against orthodoxy.”
Blunt student
By the time she began writing fiction, Brookner had been a prominent art historian specialising in French artists, notably Jean-Baptiste Greuze. At the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, her professors included Anthony Blunt, a renowned art historian later unmasked as a Soviet spy. In the 1960s she became the first woman to hold the Slade chair of fine art at Cambridge University.
Brookner published works on Greuze, Jean-Antoine Watteau, and Jacques-Louis David, but among a wider audience it was her fiction that drew attention.
Alluding to her first novel, Brookner told the Paris Review in 1987 that she had begun to write "in a moment of sadness and desperation".
“My life seemed to be drifting in predictable channels, and I wanted to know how I deserved such a fate,” she said. “I thought if I could write about it I would be able to impose some structure on my experience. It gave me a feeling of being at least in control. It was an exercise in self-analysis, and I tried to make it as objective as possible – no self-pity and no self-justification.
“But what is interesting about self-analysis is that it leads nowhere – it is an art form in itself.”
In Hotel du Lac, a woman who is spending time at a Swiss hotel is wooed by a dashing suitor after an earlier romantic debacle. Christopher Hampton adapted the novel for the BBC in 1986, in a drama starring Anna Massey and Denholm Elliott.
Discussing the book with the Paris Review, Brookner offered a rare insight into the interplay between creator and creation.
Twice in the book, the fictional author “nearly marries; she balks at the last minute and decides to stay in a hopeless relationship with a married man.”
“As I wrote it,” she added, “I felt very sorry for her and at the same time very angry: She should have married one of them – they were interchangeable anyway – and at least gained some worldly success, some social respectability. I have a good mind to let her do it in some other novel and see how she will cope!”
No children
Brookner, who herself never married, was often quoted as saying that she wrote “because I have no children”.
Anita Brookner was born in southeast London in 1928, the only daughter of a Polish immigrant couple who had changed their name from Bruckner. Her mother was a singer, her father a businessman, and the family was tended to by housemaids and gardeners.
"I was brought up to look after my parents," she told the Paris Review. "My family were Polish Jews, and we lived with my grandmother, with uncles and aunts and cousins all around, and I thought everybody lived like that. They were transplanted and fragile people, an unhappy brood, and I felt that I had to protect them.
“Indeed that is what they expected. As a result, I became an adult too soon and paradoxically never grew up.”