Anita Brookner

{{Short description|English novelist and art historian (1928–2016)}}

{{Infobox writer

|honorific_suffix = {{post-nominals|country=GBR|size=100%|CBE}}

|image = Anita Brookner.jpg

|caption =

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|birth_date = {{birth date|1928|7|16|df=y}}

|birth_place = Herne Hill, London, England

|alma_mater = King's College London

|death_date = {{death date and age|2016|3|10|1928|7|16|df=yes}}

|death_place = London, England

|occupation = {{flatlist|

Art historian
novelist

}}

|genre = Drama

|movement =

|spouse =

|children =

|signature =

|website =

|influences =

|influenced =

|notablework = Hotel du Lac

|period = 1981–2011

}}

Anita Brookner {{post-nominals|country=GBR|size=100%|CBE}} (16 July 1928 – 10 March 2016){{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35808651|title=Anita Brookner, Booker Prize-winning author, dies age 87, Times announces|work=BBC News|date=14 March 2016|access-date=14 March 2016}} was an English novelist and art historian. She was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1967 to 1968 and was the first woman to hold this visiting professorship. She was awarded the 1984 Booker–McConnell Prize for her novel Hotel du Lac.

Life and education

Brookner (Bruckner) was born in Herne Hill, a suburb of London.Free BMD: Births Jul-Sep 1928

Bruckner, Anita Schishka (mother) Camberwell 1d 991{{Cite web |url=http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/brookner.html |title=Anita Brookner, 1928– Notebooks, ca. 1986–1994 |department=Harry Ransom Center |publisher=The University of Texas at Austin |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090310024241/http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/brookner.html |archive-date=10 March 2009}} She was the only child of Newson Bruckner, a Jewish immigrant from Piotrków Trybunalski in Poland, and Maude Schiska, a singer whose grandfather had emigrated from Warsaw, Poland, and founded a tobacco factory at which her husband worked after arriving in Britain aged 18. Her mother gave up her singing career when she married and, according to her daughter, was unhappy for the rest of her life.{{cite news |url=https://www.thetimes.com/uk/article/anita-brookner-286mtsl39 |title=Anita Brookner |work=The Times |date=15 March 2016 |access-date=29 March 2020}}{{Cite news |last=McNay|url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/15/anita-brookner-obituary |first=Michael |title=Anita Brookner obituary|work=The Guardian |date=15 March 2016 |access-date=29 March 2020}} Maude changed the family's surname to Brookner because of anti-German sentiment in Britain following World War I.{{Cite news |last=Gutteridge |first=Peter |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/doctor-anita-brookner-art-historian-who-began-writing-novels-at-the-age-of-53-and-won-the-booker-a6933111.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220507/https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/doctor-anita-brookner-art-historian-who-began-writing-novels-at-the-age-of-53-and-won-the-booker-a6933111.html |archive-date=7 May 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |title=Doctor Anita Brookner: Art historian who began writing novels at the age of 53 and won the Booker Prize for Hotel du Lac |work=The Independent |date=15 March 2016 |access-date=29 March 2020}}{{cbignore}} Anita Brookner had a lonely childhood, although her grandmother and uncle lived with the family, and her parents, secular Jews, opened their house to Jewish refugees fleeing the Germans during the 1930s and World War II. "I have said that I am one of the loneliest women in London" she said in her Paris Review interview.{{Cite magazine |url=https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2630/anita-brookner-the-art-of-fiction-no-98-anita-brookner |title=Anita Brookner, The Art of Fiction No. 98 |magazine=Paris Review |access-date=20 September 2018}}{{Cite news |last=Alam |first=Rumaan |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/01/books/in-praise-of-anita-brookner.html |title=In Praise of Anita Brookner |work=The New York Times |date=1 March 2018 |access-date=29 March 2020}}

She was educated at the James Allen's Girls' School,{{Cite news |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/12194509/Anita-Brookner-novelist-obituary.html |title=Anita Brookner, novelist - obituary |work=The Daily Telegraph |date=15 March 2016 |access-date=29 March 2020}} a fee-paying school. In 1949 she received a BA in history from King's College London, and in 1953 a doctorate in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.{{Cite news |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/16/arts/international/anita-brookner-hotel-du-lac-obituary.html |title=Anita Brookner, Whose Bleak Fiction Won the Booker Prize, Dies at 87 |last=Cowell|first=Alan |date=15 March 2016|work=The New York Times |issn=0362-4331 |access-date=29 March 2020}} Under the supervision of Anthony Blunt, then director of the Courtauld, what was originally a Masters thesis on the French genre painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze was upgraded to a doctorate. She received a French government scholarship in 1950 to the École du Louvre and spent most of the decade living in Paris.

Career

=Academic=

In 1967, she became the first woman to hold the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge University. She was a visiting lecturer at Reading University from 1959 to 1964 when she became a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She was promoted to Reader at the Courtauld in 1977, where she worked until her retirement in 1988. She began her career as a specialist on 18th century French art but later extended her expertise to the romantics. She contributed articles to ArtReview in the late 1950s and early 1960s,"What is Romanticism", ArtReview, 12 September 1959.

Among her students at the Courtauld was art historian Olivier Berggruen, whose graduate work she advised.{{Cite web |url=http://artforum.com/passages/id=60245 |author=Olivier Berggruen |author-link=Olivier Berggruen |title=Olivier Berggruen on Anita Brookner (1928–2016) - artforum.com / passages |website=Artforum.com |access-date=21 June 2016}} She was a Fellow of King's College London and of New Hall, Cambridge (Murray Edwards College from 2008).

Photographs taken by Anita Brookner are held in the Conway Library of art and architecture at the Courtauld Institute.{{Cite web |date=30 June 2020 |title=Who made the Conway Library? |url=http://blog.courtauld.ac.uk/digitalmedia/2020/06/30/who-made-the-conway-library/ |access-date=19 November 2020 |website=Digital Media |archive-date=3 July 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200703211341/http://blog.courtauld.ac.uk/digitalmedia/2020/06/30/who-made-the-conway-library/ |url-status=dead }}

=Novelist=

Brookner published her first novel, A Start in Life (1981), at the age of 53. Thereafter she published roughly one a year. Brookner was regarded as a stylist. Her novels explore themes of emotional loss and difficulties associated with fitting into society, and intellectual, middle-class women, who suffer isolation and disappointments in love. Many of her characters are the children of European immigrants to Britain; a number appear to be of Jewish descent.{{British council|id=anita-brookner|name=Dr Anita Brookner}}{{Cite web |last=Malcolm |first=Cheryl Alexander |url=http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/2001/3435.html |title=Understanding Anita Brookner |publisher=University of South Carolina |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20011231004708/http://www.sc.edu/uscpress/2001/3435.html |archive-date=31 December 2001}} Hotel du Lac (1984), her fourth novel, was awarded the Booker Prize.{{Cite web |title=The Booker Prize 1984 |url=https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/prize-years/1984 |access-date=29 June 2023 |website=The Booker Prizes}}{{cite news |last1=Ezard |first1=John |last2=Webb |first2=WL |title=From the archive, 19 October 1984: Booker Prize awarded to a 6-1 outsider |url=https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/oct/19/archive-booker-prize-awarded-1984 |access-date=2 July 2023 |work=The Guardian |date=19 October 1984}}

Private life and honours

Brookner never married, but took care of her parents as they aged. Brookner commented in one interview that she had received several proposals of marriage, but rejected all of them, concluding that men were "people with their own agenda, who think you might be fitted in if they lop off certain parts. You can see them coming a mile off".{{Cite news |last=Morrison |first=Blake |date=18 June 1994 |title=A game of solitaire |language=en |work=The Independent |url=https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-game-of-solitaire-it-s-widely-assumed-that-the-lonely-intellectual-heroines-of-anita-brookner-s-novels-are-based-on-herself-that-she-s-an-unhappy-spinster-a-victim-of-circumstance-she-puts-the-record-straight-1423598.html |archive-url=https://ghostarchive.org/archive/20220507/https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-game-of-solitaire-it-s-widely-assumed-that-the-lonely-intellectual-heroines-of-anita-brookner-s-novels-are-based-on-herself-that-she-s-an-unhappy-spinster-a-victim-of-circumstance-she-puts-the-record-straight-1423598.html |archive-date=7 May 2022 |url-access=subscription |url-status=live |access-date=8 March 2022}}{{cbignore}} She gave the 1974 Aspects of Art Lecture.{{cite web|title=Aspects of Art Lectures|website=The British Academy|url=https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/lectures/listings/aspects-art-lectures/}}{{cite journal|author=Brookner, Anita|title=Jacques-Louis David: A Personal Interpretation|journal=Proceedings of the British Academy|year=1975|volume=60|pages=155–171|url=http://publications.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/pubs/proc/files/60p155.pdf|access-date=26 March 2021|archive-date=18 September 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210918103001/http://publications.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/pubs/proc/files/60p155.pdf|url-status=dead}} In 1990, she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE). She died in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea,{{cite web |title= DOR Q1/2016 in KENSINGTON AND CHELSEA (239-1C) |id= Entry Number 513506834 |url=https://www.gro.gov.uk/gro/content/certificates/indexes_search.asp#Results |website=GRO Online Indexes |publisher=General Register Office for England and Wales |url-access=registration |access-date=22 February 2022}} London, on 10 March 2016, at the age of 87.

Publications

Greuze: 1725–1805: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-century Phenomenon (1972) {{ISBN|9780236176786}} (on Jean-Baptiste Greuze)
Jacques-Louis David (1980) {{ISBN|9780064305075}} (on the history painter Jacques-Louis David)
A Start in Life (1981, US title The Debut) {{ISBN|9780241976500}}
Providence (1982) {{ISBN|9780307826213}}
Look at Me (1983) {{ISBN|9780307826206}}
Hotel du Lac (1984) {{ISBN|9780307826220}} (Booker Prize winner)
Family and Friends (1985) {{ISBN|9780307826237}}
A Misalliance (1986) {{ISBN|9780307826343}}
A Friend from England (1987) {{ISBN|9780307826336}}
Latecomers (1988) {{ISBN|9780307826183}}
Lewis Percy (1989) {{ISBN|9780307826190}}
Brief Lives (1990) {{ISBN|9780307826251}}
A Closed Eye (1991) {{ISBN|9780307826275}}
Fraud (1992) {{ISBN|9780307826268}}
A Family Romance (1993, US title Dolly) {{ISBN|9780140234060}}
A Private View (1994) {{ISBN|9780307826299}}
Incidents in the Rue Laugier (1995) {{ISBN|9780307826305}}
Altered States (1996) {{ISBN|9780307826312}}
Visitors (1997) {{ISBN|9780307826329}}
Soundings (1997) {{ISBN|9781860463884}} (collection of essays)
Falling Slowly (1998) {{ISBN|9780307826244}}
Undue Influence (1999) {{ISBN|9780307492364}}
Romanticism and its Discontents (2000) {{ISBN|9780374251598}}
The Bay of Angels (2001) {{ISBN|9781400033010}}
The Next Big Thing (2002, US title Making Things Better) (longlisted for the Booker Prize)
The Rules of Engagement (2003) {{ISBN|9780141910222}}
Leaving Home (2005) {{ISBN|9781400095650}}
Strangers (2009) (shortlisted for James Tait Black Memorial Prize) {{ISBN|9780307477583}}
At The Hairdresser (2011) (novella, available only as an e-book)

References

External links

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[https://web.archive.org/web/20090310024241/http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/research/fa/brookner.html Anita Brookner Collection] at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin

Category:1928 births

Category:2016 deaths

Category:People from Herne Hill

Category:People educated at James Allen's Girls' School

Category:20th-century English novelists

Category:20th-century English women writers

Category:21st-century English novelists

Category:21st-century English women writers

Category:Academics of the Courtauld Institute of Art

Category:Alumni of the Courtauld Institute of Art

Category:Alumni of King's College London

Category:École du Louvre alumni