Anita Brookner

Anita Brookner 1928-, English writer and art critic. After establishing an academic career at London's Courtauld Institute of Art and becoming the first woman appointed (1968) Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge, she began writing fiction in 1980, producing approximately one book a year of elegantly restrained prose. Her quiet, often bleak novels usually concern lonely, meek, and genteel middle-aged women (and occasionally men), unlucky in love and yearning for it, but largely unable to establish or maintain relationships with those around them. Brookner's works include Look at Me (1983), Hotel du Lac (1984; Booker Prize), Latecomers (1988), Fraud (1992), Undue Influence (1999), and Leaving Home (2005). Her nonfiction work Romanticism and Its Discontents (2000) is an analysis of French Romanticism.

Brookner, Anita (1928– ), novelist and art historian, educated at King's College, London, and at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge from 1967 to 1968. Her first work of fiction, A Start in Life, was published in 1981, since when she has produced a succession of perceptive and elegantly written novels, often dealing with women for whom life has become something to be endured. In Providence (1982) the central character, Kitty Maule, is an academic working on the Romantic tradition who becomes infatuated with a professor of medieval history, while Hotel du Lac (1984; Booker Prize) concerns a romantic novelist who takes refuge in a Swiss hotel and meets a man whom she thinks will transform her life; A Misalliance (1986) is the story of Blanche Vernon, whose husband has deserted her for a younger woman. In Brief Lives (1990) the relationship between a former singer and her self-obsessive friend Julia is examined. Other novels include Look at Me (1983), Family and Friends (1985), A Closed Eye (1991), Fraud (1992), A Family Romance (1993), A Private View (1994), Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995), The Next Big Thing (2002), and Making Things Better (2003). She has edited two volumes of the short stories of E. Wharton (1988–9).